The biggest myth about cryptocurrencies is that they can be invested in. Namely, to invest, there must be a resource to invest in and which serves as a source of profit for investors. Cryptocurrencies lack such a resource. Let's look at a few examples of traditional investment instruments to understand this.

In the case of stocks, that resource is the company's business operations or equity. Business operations generate profits, from which investors can benefit by receiving dividends. Equity can be liquidated or used to repurchase shares, allowing investors to profit from liquidation proceeds or share repurchases.

For real estate, precious metals, oil, wheat, etc., investors profit from their intrinsic value by using it for various purposes such as housing, making jewelry and electronics, obtaining energy and food products, etc.

A more complex example is fiat currencies. In this case, the resource is debt. Units of fiat currency are created when commercial and central banks lend money to businesses, individuals, and governments. This means they represent debt. Subsequently, investors invest goods, services, and labor into this debt through market exchanges with these entities. However, since the entities must return the units to the banks, investors profit from them. They profit from businesses and individuals through counter-exchanges, i.e., by receiving goods, services, and labor from them when they need units for loan repayments. And they profit from governments because governments allow them to pay taxes in these units. If businesses and individuals do not make counter-exchanges, they will default. Then investors will profit by banks selling them seized property of these debtors to obtain the units for closing outstanding loans.

With cryptocurrencies, nothing like the above exists. In other words, there are no business operations, equity, intrinsic value, debt, or any other resource that investors can profit from.

So, what are people doing when they say they "invest" in cryptocurrencies? What are cryptocurrencies if not investment instruments?

Well, people are simply participating in a scheme where they give money and other assets to each other in the hope of getting more back in the future. Cryptocurrencies are merely a numerical record of this scheme.

For example, a few moments ago, one member of this scheme gave another $61,066. The Bitcoin system recorded this by increasing the number associated with the first member's address by 1 and decreasing the number associated with the second member's address by 1. Initially, members gave each other $0.001 for the same numerical record (+1/-1). One can also enter the scheme by spending electrical energy, which is recorded by the cryptosystem through an arbitrarily predefined increment of numbers.

The aforementioned does not constitute investment because there is no resource: a) of which a value per unit can be determined; b) that serves as a source of profit for investors. Value per unit is actually the amount of profit that can be generated per unit of that resource. In other words, cryptocurrency systems do not have digital money or digital assets, as is commonly believed. This is because money and assets are actually resources that meet the above two criteria.

When someone tells you they have "invested" in cryptocurrency or hold crypto "assets," ask them the following: how much can be profited per unit of this "asset"? They will likely respond with something like, "well, the last price of Bitcoin was $61,066, so that's about how much it can be profited". However, this is not the profit we're talking about because those dollars did not come from a resource within the Bitcoin system but from the pocket of the last "investor". The correct answer is "zero" simply because there is nothing within the system that can serve as a source of profit for investors.

Therefore, cryptocurrencies are not about investing in assets, monetary transactions, supply and demand, or anything related to economy or markets. Instead, they are about digitally recording participation in pyramid-style schemes, storing that record in decentralized databases called blockchains, and wrapping it all up in economic jargon. That is literally all there is to cryptocurrencies.