"But all they have, and see with their own eyes to have, are numbers next to their addresses"

When you wrote this for some reason I thought you were referring to UTXO's when you wrote "addresses", and that you had taken a deeper dive into bitcoin than I thought. I wonder why my brain translated things this way. Maybe because you took the time to write so many words, I must have figured surely this person had taken a deep deep deep dive to write so much. Oh well, my bad.