Bitcoin is currency, not money (and certainly not a commodity ie standardized material good)
Bitcoin is
A currency without a face value
An equity which can never pay a dividend
A bond with no coupon and zero principal
A commodity with no industrial demand
But limited supply!
It looks sane only in comparison to the even greater insanity of fiat currency
quotingI think secure accounting systems (with self-custodial units that can be transferred or brought with the user globally) compete with each other in terms of security, immutability, liquidity, etc.
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In other words, now that this technology exists, it serves a need that I and others want. I don’t want to “redeem” bitcoins for anything- I want to take some of my dollars (units of a centralized ledger which don’t “count” anything other than themselves) and some of my gold (scare nature-based units but ones that I can’t really bring globally out of or into ports of entry), and convert them into units that are more portable.
Bitcoin provides a utility that so far nothing else can- I can memorize twelve words and use them to bring money globally. I don’t want to redeem my dollars, gold, or bitcoin for anything, other than goods and services. They are all basically units on a ledger, with different maintainers of the ledger (a central bank, or nature, or miners+nodes).
So if I determine that I want some % of my network to be self-custodial and globally portable, which imo seems to be a no-brainer, I then have to determine 1) what % of my net worth and 2) in which network or networks.
The only three network options at scale are Bitcoin and Ethereum, and then stablecoins which run on those and other networks. Of these, Bitcoin is the most decentralized, immutable, and biggest (which is relevant for salability/liquidity). Ethereum is big but more centralized, so I can’t really know what it’ll look like in say five years. Historically it had difficulty bombs which made hard forks easy to do, and now it uses proof of stake. And then stablecoins are useful but centralized; they are just digital Eurodollars.
So if I want globally portable and rather immutable units on a rather decentralized ledger, that is liquid and that I can self custody, Bitcoin pretty much uniquely offers that utility. And it has a monetary premium on top of its utility because it is scarce and has lots of optionality. So imo it serves as commodity money like anything else.