Quote from: larry_vw_1955 on Today at 12:09:55 AM

Quote from: JamesNZ on June 20, 2024, 06:29:48 AM

Having faith that you'll get rich quick in a scheme is not a problem. But constantly misrepresenting the scheme is. If you bought numbers on the screen and then believe you'll be able sell them for a better price that's fine. But if you try to attract buyers by spreading lies that your numbers count a valuable digital asset, money, coins, tokens, energy, work, whatever ... that's a problem. And someone must react to expose those lies.

yes I believe a little honesty is called for on behalf of people "evangelizing" bitcoin. one argument that I hate hearing is "bitcoin is valuable because it cost $XXXX to mine".

The core problem is that there's that name "Bit-coin", suggesting that people have some kind of coins in the amount of numbers they see on the screen. But no such coins exist. Coins are metal disc. The evangelists would tyen say: "But bit-coins are electronic or digital coins." Besides that being an oxymoron, like wooden iron, if you have a electronic item you have to be able to show or describe what you have. There are for example electronic tokens like electronic poker chips or gift cards but they represent the liability of their issuers to redeem them for something. Satoshi Nakamoto has no liability to redeem that what he issues via his protocol. So, no electronic tokens exist in the system. And that's why no one can show or describe a resource in the amount of numbers they see on the screen. When people say that they "mine Bitcoin" what this actually means is that the protocol will show them a number on the screen once they solve a hash combination. Literally, they spend energy to get something they can get numbers on the screen. It's crazy how dumb this is.