nostranger on Nostr: Bitcoin is the analog of digital money… Well maybe not literally, but recent ...

Bitcoin is the analog of digital money…

Well maybe not literally, but recent comments by Peter Schiff left me scratching my head about how little he still seems to understand. There was his usual retort about Bitcoin not having intrinsic value, but it was his comparison of Bitcoin to the digital version of music, saying that at least digital music has substance, that I find puzzling. If you think about an LP on vinyl, that has some unique, one-of-a-kind property to it that its digital counterpart does not. Digitalisation immediately removes the uniqueness of something, as it can be perfectly duplicated indefinitely henceforth. Bitcoin otoh flips this concept on its head, attaining and maintaining the uniqueness of its ledger by bootstrapping this perfect duplicability property to enable all users to share a single source of truth, in turn ensuring the uniqueness of each holder’s Bitcoin. As the ledger is secured by real-world energy, the uniqueness of the Bitcoin would start to crumble without this proof-of-work, as it would soon start to be double-spent and would quickly become worthless. In this respect, Bitcoin is an analog form of money. It cannot exist as a static arrangement of 1’s and 0’s solely in the digital realm. This is what sets it apart from mere digital representations of things, and is its greatest strength. It’s certainly ironic that the first real contender to become the native currency of the Information Age and the internet is more analog than most of the payments systems currently in use today. This is clearly lost on Peter along with his sheer blindness to the fact that Bitcoin’s intrinsic value is the purity of its function as a monetary medium itself, unobscured and undiluted by other non-monetary properties such as jewellery, industrial uses and paper aeroplanes