If I move a rock from my left to my right does the rock weight more?

Just because a physical thing changes state doesn't mean it weights more.

> If I move a rock from my left to my right does the rock weight more?

It does to your left and your right. If I have a piece of paper with a one on it, and another one with a zero on it, and I exchange them. Do they weigh differently?

Its a bit surprising that I'm being downvoted on a tech forum for asserting that information doesn't have weight.

> Its a bit surprising that I'm being downvoted on a tech forum for asserting that information doesn't have weight.

You are being downvoted for espousing an erroneous definition of the word "physical".

I think the clarifications on what is physical were pretty clear. The information in a ledger isn't physical. The information stored in data isn't physical. It's information. Information isn't physical no matter what medium you choose to store it in.

I have to agree with you. If I take an empty hard drive and fill it with information, clearly it's information content has increased but its physical weight would be the same. You could argue that it contained 0s or 0xffs to begin with but since they are all the same the quantity of information is less. So information itself does not have a weight but it exists in the state of physical objects which do have weight.

Of course information has non-zero weight. Whether on a harddrive, or in your brain, it is a physical state, which has non-zero weight by definition. Why do you think information can exist that does not consist of matter?