I think the hangup with BTC as a commodity is that I can make a loaf of bread with wheat and eat it and the amount of wheat in the world is depleted as a result. Similarly I can use gold to build a cell phone or some jewelry and while it is possible to recover it isn't as simple as trading BTC. How is a BTC consumed?

The majority of gold usage is in investment/central bank reserve. Technology applications are a fraction of the usage. Jewelry is a major usage, however part of the reason for its use in jewelry is a hybrid combination of its store of value properties (ex. in Indian culture afaik, gold jewelry plays a large part in passing down wealth, families gift gold jewelry at weddings etc.).

So you consume bitcoin the same way a central bank consumes gold: by sitting on it, selling it when you need to, or buying more in times of expected turmoil.

Bitcoin is far younger than gold (12 years vs thousands), so its obviously more volatile.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-in...

Trading something doesn’t consume it. That’s a very confusing overloading of terminology.

Well consumer comes from the base word consume, which by definition includes the buying of a good or service, which is essentially a trade.

Consume:

- eat, drink, or ingest (food or drink).

- buy (goods or services).

- use up (a resource).

- (especially of a fire) completely destroy.

- (of a feeling) absorb all of the attention and energy of (someone).

I was asking an honest question but I don't like being trolled. Have a nice day.

How would you be trolled? You asked and you got answered. What are you disagreeing with?

None of these responses answer the question.

Not sure why you think you're being trolled. Have a good one.

You’re not bing trolled? Wat.

BTC is consumed when someone forgets their password.

Technically the thing you hold and use is a transaction output, and once an unspent transaction output (UTXO) is spent it can't be spent again. So from that perspective it is consumed!

I thought it was consumed when you spend it, and a new coin is produced. That's my hangup with it as a commodity. You can't transfer BTC without destroying it.

shaping gold into jewelry doesn't consume it. One of the reasons its been currency for 5k years is because you can melt it down and re-use it as coins or other jewelry etc. Gold isn't consumed, for the most part.

Commodities are usually raw/close-to-raw inputs into some process. Bitcoin doesn’t really meet that, but again the whole point is recent technological innovations haven’t really settled into the language yet.

And again, that is by design of both the instruments themselves and the massive PR campaigns/grifts around them.

The whole trick is attempting to position these things as “the half of the definition of commodity that means this has intrinsic value but not the other half of the definition which says it’s a raw input,” or “the half of the definition of a security that means You Can Make Money, but not the other half that says I can be regulated as someone selling a You Can Make Money instrument.”

This is my read as well. However,I think if you regulate the security like stuff in the same way we regulate existing financial instruments the whole thing collapses anyways, so who really cares what we call this specific coin.