Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Bitcoin Doesn’t Exist, Or How Satoshi Nakamoto Tells Lies To People
by
NotATether
on 09/06/2021, 08:18:07 UTC
Well I always like a constructive debate.

If bitcoin is a thing that exists, then you don't need a new investor to voluntarily accept quantity next to your address in the exchange for his funds. Rather, you can benefit from the thing behind the quantity, which you claim exists. However, if Bitcoin doesn't exist then you are left only with quantity next to your address. Since quantity by itself is just a mathematical concept you are left with nothing.

Going back to your analogy about bitcoin and MS Office licenses, you are right that there is something behind the quantity of MS office licenses - the MS office programs.

In bitcoin you can't benefit from the transaction outputs behind the quantity of bitcoin. That's because MS office licenses are goods, and not financial assets.

Gold, cash, Tesla stock, futures, these are all financial assets because they are backed by something that doesn't have a tangible benefit to people (ownership of debt). Same reason why sneakers, phones etc. are not financial assets because there's no ownership of debt backing them, it's something physical backing them.

Now let's prove that bitcoin does have an ownership of debt:

When some country mints new banknotes (the US did that in 2013 if my memory's correct), they must find something to back this quantity of banknotes. So they take a ton of foreign exchange reserves (such as cash or precious metals) and use that as the basis of the debt - ownership debt relative to these foreign assets.

In Bitcoin, the "foreign exchange reserves" are investors' fiat currency. So you can view the quantity of bitcoin backed by ownership of investors fiat reserves and this is precicesly why the price is able to go up and why it was originally zero: The more fiat that investors bring, the more reserves that can be repurposed as debt.

Combine that with the bitcoin supply being fixed, and you have a constant total quantity versus an ever increasing asset reserve.

Now the question: can you benefit from the quantity next to your address without a new investor voluntarily accepting this quantity?

You can't. That's precisely what my last two paragraphs were about.