Bitcoin Forum

Can we relabel the front page of bitcoin to say crypto-commodity instead of crypto-currency?  After much thinking I believe that it is a commodity. Also lawyers in France are using the bitcoin.org homepage against us.

Can we please relabel it for the sake of bitcoin and because it really is a commodity?

Thank you.

A cryptographic commodity.  :)

1+ agree

It was the money transfers which fell foul of French financial regulations.  Whether Bitcoin is a currency or a commodity doesn't change the fact that MtGox needs to be licensed in order to conduct those monetary transfers under French law.

No, because it's not a commodity.  Bitcoin is a currency, by definition, and cannot be a commodity, also by definition.  If you disagree, then you don't know what these words mean.  Even if we all agreed to start calling it something that it isn't, that wouldn't change a thing; certainly not France or any other entity considering it a currency.

Not to mention that many nations have laws which regulate the sale and exchange of commodities, anyway.

MtGox could call Bitcoin a pog or a token, but it's the various financial services laws of each individual nation which will determine how it's legally defined there and in particular how the exchanges must operate in respect of it.  Different nations may regulate it quite differently.

Bitcoin is both a commodity AND a currency. They are not mutually exclusive concepts.

 Here's why: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=47111.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=47111.0)

If you think in terms of the popular Bitcoin metaphors, such as buying, selling, sending, receiving, mining, losing, borrowing, etc., bitcoins, they do seem like a commodity.  But these are just metaphors and not the economic reality.  The reality is that there are no bitcoins.  There are numbers in the blockchain, and these numbers represent bitcoins, but the bitcoins that are being represented do not really exist.  It's all pretend (or delusion).

I think calling bitcoins a commodity is stretching the truth a bit (no pun intended).

No, he and his descendants hate Bitcoin.

http://www.economywatch.com/files/imagecache/story/story/the-worlds-richest-family-you-didnt-know-about.01-06_1.jpg

Bitcoin is like gold. Is gold a currency?  No

It is. I've bought things for gold and silver more times than I can count. It acts as currency alright and I'll certainly take it over fiat currency any day.

Bitcoin IS NOT A CURRENCY.

Bitcoin is no generally accepted medium of exchange.
Bitcoin is no unit of account.
Bitcoins cannot be held longer than a few minutes without being subject to potentially huge losses.

Noone is paid in Bitcoins.
Noone lives on Bitcoins.

This is what Bitcoin is: USD => BTC => USD

It’s a payment method for fiat money. A USD proxy. Nothing more, currently.

I added the emphasis  :o

Whenever minted into distinct units of weight, yes it is.

While not mutually exclusive, they each have characteristics that make them each.  A currency is anything that is intended to be, or by defacto use is, traded as a unit of exchange value.  While a commodity is anything that has a general or consumptive use besides, or in addition to, it's uses as a unit of exchange and storage of value.  Oil can be burned, and copper made into wires.  Both have trade and storage of value uses, but that is not their only useful function.  Bitcoin has no other function than as it's intended use in exchange or storage of value, thus cannot be a commodity.

Hahaha look at all the doublethink by people who can't withdraw their money from MtGox over the weekend. :)

Bitcoin is digital gold that can be transfered on a network based on cryptographic principles. As the real gold it can be both commodity and currency. And like the real gold it can not be... illegal. It simply exists! How do you use it is your own business!

About that...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

So, taking advantage of a wartime statute... You have to recognize your country is at war because in a time of war everything can be criminalized. In a war time you'd better have a gun than gold. Paper money is just... paper. Even then the only money you can buy gun is gold. This is what history tells us for gold as money has 6000 years of history!

+1 OP

The day that I can take a bitcoin and hammer it into a virtual salad bowl is the day that I will agree that bitcoin is a commodity.

Bitcoin is only a commodity in the sense that its backed by its ability to be transferred across the internet easily, anonymously, cheaply and securely; better than any other currency. One would usually define this as money but it could also be said that money is a commodity backed by the same use.

A logical answer seems to be that money is a commodity.

Write the private key in the salad bowl

If its virtual all you have to do is think it up in your head and you did it!
Actually you already did that soo.... yeah

The process of transfering funds around the Internet is a service that the bitcoin network performs with near zero cost, but that service is neither an inherent feature of the currency that is bitcoin, nor is it possible for a service to also be a consumable with an alternative use than it's monetary intent.

Thus, back as square one.  Bitcoin is a currency, and only a currency, because it's intended to be used as such and cannot serve in any other capacity.

And the words money and currency are not interchangable.

To call bitcoin a currency is debatable what if everyone used Bitcoins as a representation of stocks of ownership and each address what to show the amount of Stocks each person held. I dunno just throwing it out there that I think bitcoin is just "Bitcoin" and its so new and crazy idea that nobody knows what it is or what potential we can do with it. But all i know is if we classify it, we could possibly restrict our selves to future uses if we Define Bitcoins as anything other then a Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is to currency what plutonium is to fuel. (this belongs in the one-liner thread)

Bitcoin is not a commodity though it shares some properties of a commodity (namely inelastic supply).  That's a useful framework for thinking about how the value of bitcoin fluctuates and how it trades, but it does not make it a commodity.  
Bitcoin is a protocol, but that doesn't really say much about why bitcoin is useful.  However, it does give one a clue as to what gives bitcoin its fundamental value.

Jeff Garzik described it as a distributed digital notary service, which I think is a great description of the role mining and the block chain serves in bitcoin.

If I type in "definition of commodity" into google, it yields "A raw material or primary agricultural product that can be bought and sold, such as copper or coffee."  Under this definition, bitcoin is not a commodity.  A second definition says "A useful or valuable thing, such as water or time."  You could make a plausible argument that bitcoin is a commodity under this second definition.  However, when people use the term commodity in association with bitcoin, I think they are most often drawing comparisons with the inelastic supply of precious metals and fungibility.  But inelastic supply is not a property that all commodities share (and even precious metals aren't as inelastic as bitcoin).  And commodities are not innately useful as a monetary system or currency (not even gold until you fashion it into coins or bars to facilitate exchange).  The term commodity is generally used in association with something whose individual units have some utility value, and that doesn't describe bitcoin.  So, I have to disagree with the title of this thread that claims bitcoin is a commodity.  It is not.

If I type in "definition of money" into google, it yields "A current medium of exchange in the form of coins and banknotes; coins and banknotes collectively" (among many other hits).  This certainly does not describe bitcoin, however I think this definition might be too narrow.

If I type in "definition of currency" into google, I see "A system of money in general use in a particular country."  That also doesn't describe bitcoin (because it's not in general use and it's trans-national), but I might again argue this definition is too narrow.

If you believe that the physical bills and coins that represent USD are currency, while the US dollar system in general is money, then under more general definitions of money and currency, you could argue that the bitcoin protocol is a system of money, while the actual software and transactions used for transferring bitcoins are the currency of that monetary system.

Personally, I think the website has about the best possible description when it says bitcoin is a p2p digital currency.  That might not be desirable for legal purposes in certain countries, but I hardly think what the website says is going to sway rulings on bitcoin one way or another.  Lawyers will examine how bitcoin is used in practice rather than focus too much on what some website says.  The website should describe as best as possible what bitcoin is for the benefit of potential users rather than worry about how courts might view bitcoin.  In the long run, users are what matter most.

Revive old topics, since this one is not settled.

In this morning Wall Street Journal, Paul Vigna subtitle his article : "Battling camps at odds over digital currency’s purpose—commodity or quick way to settle transactions?" - https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-virtual-currency-war-that-threatens-to-tear-bitcoin-apart-1497956400

I take offense with the word "Purpose"; the purpose of Satochi was to create a Currency and he failed miserably; he created a Commodity because wanted to make sure noone controls it.

To have a Currency, you need to have Control over it's user, over the commodity in which you give the artificial value; without Control you cannot have a currency. And that is why I disagree with Eric Voorhees 2011 version because he didn't account for the control portion.

Bitcoin is Deflationary because it's a commodity that people Hoarder (https://youtu.be/XNu5ppFZbHo?t=2m17s) but is it a bad thing ? Can we create a society where we consume less ?

Theo Chino
https://twitter.com/theochino & https://twitter.com/TheoBitcoin

My thoughts:

Community <-> Commodity

^There is something related (at least some letters)

Crypto - sure

Currency / Sound money ?  both flawed

-> Social crypto commodity

New asset class for sure!

However it wants to be labeled, bitcoin can either be classified as currency or commodity. When defining commodity or currency, then we will understand bitcoin can be any of the two.

According to merriam webster;

MY VERDICT
Whatever we want to call it, commodity or currency, Bitcoin still remains a special innovation that will change the world but from the definitions above though, I will rather classify it as ... ehm... BOTH, ... well, it somehow falls in both categories.

The beauty of Bitcoin it can be everything that can be represented in digital form. Using it as money is just the simple use case.

BTW, you should learn the difference between money and currency!

Yeah it is a commodity, and also a currency.

People use it as a store of value and a long term investment. A safe house for keeping your money. Because keeping you rmoney in FIAT in almost any country means you are losing value each year as inflation picks up.

Using it as a currency is obvious. We use it to buy and sell things. We use it as a means of trade, ergo a currency. Many many people and businesses now accept bitcoin, it essentially is a currency for a lot of people.

At first bitcoin was created for currency purpose, it's for doing transaction globally, but after seeing the price movements that go up really fast and the value of bitcoin is going up, people used it as investment and trading tools, and now more people used it as commodity not as currency, but bitcoin can be used as both

The inflationary risks of holding wealth in USD pales in comparison to the volatility risks of holding wealth in Bitcoin. The federal reserve targets an inflation rate of 2% per year. Bitcoin reguarly hits swings of 25% in a single week. Do not let bitcoin's LONGTERM general upward trend disguise the actual risk of of severe short term losses when you may need cash. To the rational investor, it's not even a question.

Whew!
A lot of legendary's and Donator's here and it seems they cant approve with one answer.
I do think it is a commodity too. But somehow when I think about the merchants who have accepted it is a means of payment it becomes a currency.
It is like gold for me just made it online. It is mined and there is this buy and sell with a lot of movements with its price same with gold. Currencies dont move like that. Ergh! Can it be both?