kevin_strom on Nostr: A man who said he preferred gold or cash or "anything of value" over Bitcoin recently ...

A man who said he preferred gold or cash or "anything of value" over Bitcoin recently asked "how can something that is digital be worth anything?" I answered:

Well, gold is just a certain arrangement of protons, neutrons, and spinning electrons, and spinning electrons etc. aren't rare or valuable, are they? But in that particular arrangement called "gold," they have utility and beauty and rarity -- and so are indeed valuable.

It is the same with Bitcoin. Ones and zeroes aren't worth much in and of themselves. But if you arrange them -- program them -- to do something useful (think Photoshop, or Linux), then they definitely have value. And when you arrange them so as to form an immutable ledger -- the first guaranteed-to-be-honest ledger in all of human history -- and protect the values transmitted by that ledger with perfect and eternal scarcity, and then protect that honesty and scarcity with the largest wall of cryptographic computing power ever assembled, so strong that even state-level actors cannot break it -- THEN you have the supreme monetary asset, compared to which all others are evaporating sno-cones in the Sahara sun, especially "cash."