Using the fact you can sell it for minimal slippage, you could call Apple shares money, but they're not. They're shares. Nothing is priced in Apple shares.
The attributes of money are: durability, portability, divisibility, uniformity, limited supply, and acceptability.
Bitcoin is not accepted basically anywhere (the overwhelming majority of places that claim to, use a service like BitPay that immediately sells it and gives the merchant actual money). It's also not uniform, because each sat carries with it the entire transaction history. It's also not particularly portable because its global transaction count is limited to 7tps and it costs an unbelievable quantity to do so from time to time. It's also not durable because everyone keeps losing their wallets and the lost bitcoin is effectively destroyed. All it has is limited supply and divisibility -- and portability, depending how compelling you find my argument against -- but you really do have to get all 6 to win.
Coinbase attorneys regularly compare crypto to Beanie Babies.
> "It is akin to the sale of a parcel of land, the value of which may fluctuate after the sale. Or a condo in anew development. Or an American Girl Doll, or a Beanie Baby, or a baseball card," Coinbase attorneys stated in a motion it filed in August 2023. [1]
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2024/01/19/crypto-beani...
It could have been a sqlite db file on a raspberry pi somewhere, keeping track of digital jars of goat semen that people then pay real dollars for. But no, instead we're wasting one Australia worth of electricity on Bitcoin.
Dollar is also just paper, there is no underlying thing except trusting the united states.
Im not arguing its worth the amount of energy, but its not as dumb as you pretend it is
That is... oddly specific.
The original USD sunk into the system is mostly gone, spent on electricity, mining rigs, hookers, and blow.
If you attempted to withdraw that much money, you’d be stonewalled.
The only way to do it would be to hire some coders, set up your own “trading” web site, and convince a million rubes to part with a thousand each on average. You’d have to do this for years while loudly saying “Bitcoin is not fake money” in every Internet forum you can spam, because otherwise the music might stop before you can cash out.