There’s only one AAPL because we all agree there is. What if the NYSE and NASDAQ disagreed? It all comes down to people.

This is the bait-and-switch of crypto. People act like it’s all code and messy humans aren’t involved and this just isn’t true.

The original comment I replied to said there will only ever ever be 21,000,000 Bitcoin. I believe this is not fundamentally true because “Bitcoin” is whatever people say it is. If we all agreed to accept a fork with 22mil and call it Bitcoin, then that’s what it is. Sure, that old fork only has 21mil, but who cares? Old forks get dropped all the time.

This all isn’t entirely theoretical. This already happened with the other major part of cryptocurrencies, the immutable blockchain. What we all call ETH has a rollback in it!

No, this hasn’t happened with BTC but there’s no reason it can’t. Every second that the Bitcoin blockchain doesn’t get rolled back, every second that there are only 21 mil possible Bitcoin is because we all collectively agree that’s the case.

Stocks and cryptocurrency are not at all the same thing, I assume people think this way only because they can both be summarized as a number that moves up and down over time. Apple is a company located in the physical world that owns raw materials and a business process that transforms raw materials into value. It makes no sense to have another Apple ticker because the point of a stock is to track the value of that physical company. Cryptocurrency is totally different in the sense that it isn't a thing that exists in the physical world, instead it is a collective abstraction over a distributed database that the users agree to call "bitcoin". It is a purely political designation.

It’s an interesting argument that a cryptocurrency designation is more political than a corporation!

I argue that they’re about the same. A corporation is largely numbers in computers and how people feel about them. A cryptocurrency is numbers in computers and how people feel about therm.

Typing this out makes me appreciate gold a bit more. Gold is gold, whether we give it a different name or not. It’s not pure thought-stuff like a corporation. The problem is it only has whatever value we give it, so I’m certainly not arguing it has inherent value or is a better currency.

A corporation is not "pure thought-stuff"; it is a legal designation for a physical business process facilitated by people and machines in the real world. The legal entity "corporation" is purely political, but the thing we really care about (a business process) is ultimately pegged to physical reality. The legal corporate entity is the map, the business-process-in-action is the territory.

I totally agree with your map/territory analogy. When I’m referring to a corporation I’m not talking about all the physical things in the world (the company) but what you’re calling a legal entity.

I would also bet good money that most corporations in the world do not map directly to a business-process-in-action. Most corporations are a layer of abstraction of ownership. There are many more of these than real businesses in the physical world.

Stock market tickers are exchange dependent, especially across geographic boundaries, so to avoid confusion as to which stock is referred to, many finance sites include the exchange as a prefix to the ticker, i.e., NYSE:AAPL.

However, at least in the US, a company is not allowed to choose a stock ticker already in use by a company publicly traded on a US exchange.