You are not in control of funds. You are in control of a number. Number is an abstraction used to express the quantity of funds. So funds and number are two different things. In blockchain you have numbers not funds. Funds are fictional or nonexistent.

I've heard a hundred different definitions of Bitcoin. This one is new. So Bitcoin is now debt, like fiat. Well, I have a few questions for you then. Who's the debtor and who's the creditor? Fiat is claim of the banks (central or commercial) and they withdraw it from circulation with every loan repayment. Bitcoin is claim on who, and who withdraws it from circulation?

It seems that every person has their own definition of Bitcoin. That's understandable given that Bitcoin doesn't exist and everyone just uses their imagination to describe Bitcoin in whatever way that is convenient for them.

You cannot refute an argument by talking nonsense. You refute it by proving that premises are false or that the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises.

If you remove me and leave only quantity, either 1 or 37 trillion what do you have? Well, you have number referred to nothing. That's quantity in the blockchain. Number referred to nothing. When you transfer quantity to your address you own xx pieces of nothingness. And that nothingness is called "bitcoin". Thanks for proving my point.

I don't "think", but I know Bitcoin doesn't exist. It is a fact it doesn't exist. You want it simple? Ok. In the blockchain you have quantity. Quantity is defined as the amount of something. If quantity in the blockchain is Bitcoin then it follows that Bitcoin is the quantity and quantity is Bitcoin. Which is nonsense because in that case Bitcoin would be defined as reference to itself: "Bitcoin is the amount of Bitcoin". And this is obviously nonsensical. So, if in the blockchain we have quantity then outside the blockchain there must be something called Bitcoin that has this quantity. But except quantities, address holders own nothing. Or simply put: Bitcoin doesn't exist.

Everything you said is true. But bitcoin still doesn't exist. Because you can pretend it exists, you can imagine there is something behind the quantity and the name. For example. I can sell you a car which evaporated in an explosion and doesn't exist anymore. Because everything is done via paperwork. We simply imagine the car still exist and make the transfer. That car would still have quantity. It would still have properties in our heads, but not in the real world. The same is true with bitcoin. It has quantities and imagined properties but it doesn't exist in the real world.

Or let me explain it another way.

Imagine a friend saying to you: "You own 10 Ferraris and 50 luxury apartments in Hawaii." Of course, you don't own them, so you would probably laugh at such a statement. Now imagine an anonymous guy, let's call him Satoshi Nakamoto, saying to you: "you own a revolutionary digital asset, digital gold, money of the future." You would also probably laugh at such a statement because you know that you own nothing of a such. But, you see, millions and millions of people around the world believe Satoshi. They believe to own some revolutionary digital asset. And the only reason they believe it is because Satoshi told them so. They even spend enormous amounts of electricity to keep Satoshi's statements stored in database. And they even pay an enormous amount of money to transfer these statements from one name to another. Currently, we live in a time of a collective madness. Madness, in which an anonymous author wrote a computer program through which he is saying something to people. And people blindly believe him.

To better understand what's going on, let's go back to your friend. Imagine that your friend formally writes his statement into a database as data. First column in this database would contain owner's name, the second quantity of asset, and the third name of asset. So we would have something like this: "John Smith", "10", Ferrari. The second row in the database would be this: "John Smith", "50", Luxury apartment. So this is your friend's statement stored as data in a database. Now, would such transformation of verbal statement into data mean that you became the owner of Ferraris and apartments? That you magically became rich? Of course not. That would be ridiculous. Just because your friend stored his statement into a database as data, that doesn't make the statement true. It is still false. It still contains fake quantity data on the said assets. But in the current bitcoin madness, Satoshi's statements in the form of data, are considered true. And they are believed blindly. Namely, this anonymous guy, Satoshi Nakamoto, wrote a computer program through which he is saying to people, who performed a certain job, that they own a specific quantity of a revolutionary digital asset called Bitcoin. The job performed is the maintenance of a database that contains quantities of Bitcoin and virtual addresses of people who "own" Bitcoin. The database is called blockchain, while the maintainers are called miners. But now comes the fun fact: Bitcoin doesn't exist. The "revolutionary digital asset" is fictional. It is as fictional as the Ferraris and luxury apartments in the statement of your friend. And although we at least know what Ferraris or luxury apartments are, here we have some "revolutionary digital asset" but nobody even knows what this asset is. Nobody knows to what thing in the real world blockchain quantity data belongs. Only name was given to it: "Bitcoin". Generally speaking, quantity is defined as the amount of something, so here, "something" is Bitcoin. But besides the amount and address in the blockchain no asset exists anywhere that is in the ownership of address holders. And if one were to ask them where is the revolutionary digital asset, where is the thing that has quantity written next to their addresses, they wouldn’t be able to show it. That is because Bitcoin is fictional. It doesn’t exist. Their ownership of Bitcoin is imaginary the same as your ownership of Ferraris and apartments.

All that people are doing in the Satoshi's scheme, is sending and receiving quantities of fictional Bitcoins. And every such transfer is recorded in the blockchain. So the whole scheme, is as nonsensical as believing that just because your friend stored his statement into a database as data, that you now own Ferraris and apartments. And because you "own" them, you believe you are rich. How rich? Well if you scam a guy to whose name in a database you would transfer quantity data on two nonexistent luxury apartments, and he would pay you $1,000,000 for the transfer, then you would have (50-2)*$500.000 or 24 million dollars worth of "assets". This is how "rich" you would be. You would be "rich" because your friend made a fantasy statement and stored it into a database. This the essence behind Satoshi's scheme. People believe that they are rich, that they own some revolutionary digital asset, just because Satoshi’s computer program makes fantasy statements in the form of quantity data. That's the collective madness we currently live in. And because people have fall for this madness there is now the explosion of authors who create computer programs through which they make such fantasy statements. Only names given to nonexistent assets are different.

Quantity written on the medium is always intangible. You cannot for example touch quantity on paper bills or on deposit account. But quantity is not an asset. Quantity is just a number that expresses the amount of an asset. In blockchain you have the amount, but the asset that this amount is supposed to express is nonexistent. So, Bitcoin is NOT a digitally represented asset. Bitcoin is nonexistent asset. And therefore it cannot be distributed as a “debt”. Granted loans are being distributed as debt and the amount of that debt is expressed with the quantity on paper bills or banking accounts.

Regarding your example. A 3D printer printing tangible items called “bitcoins” every 10 minutes means that the items exist and thus, we can use quantity on some medium to express their amount. But in the current bitcoin scheme you only have quantity on the digital medium but not the items themselves. Neither tangible nor intangible. The items are fictional and as such they are called "bitcoins".

So, if instead of tangible items, we had a public ledger showing what address has what quantity, that means that there's nothing in the real world that has quantity expressed in the ledger. Wich makes the whole ledger just a giant storage of fake data.

What has costs is not the production of Bitcoin, but storing and maintaining fake quantity data in the blockchain. Those processes don't produce something. They only spend that what is already produced, which is electricity. Adding numbers to blockchain is just adding statements about quantity of fictional Bitcoins - which is a trivial, algorithmically predetermined task.

The quantity of licences (number) and the licenses themselves (asset) are two different things. The first only measures the second. In blockchain, you have quantity of Bitcoins (number), but not Bitcoin (asset) itself. Private keys have access to quantity not to Bitcoins. Bitcoins don't exist. They are fictional. It is explained in details why.

Of course BTC is not created out of thin air given it's nonexistent. But quantity data on nonexistent BTC is created out of thin air. The fact the creating is done after POW is like writing letter on a piece of paper after one does hundred push-up, and then claim that the letter is not created out of thin air. It is. Letters and numbers are always created out of thin air. Regarding scarcity. Only existent things can be scarce. If you put a limit in an algorithm to 21 million this is just an arbitrary decision. You could have put it to 21 trillion. It doesn't matter. It's just numbers. And numbers can go to infinity. Numbers, that is, quantities have nothing to do with scarcity. And all you have in blockchain is quantities.

(tl;dr
When people talk about Bitcoin what they actually talk about is statement about Bitcoin. But Bitcoin itself doesn't exist. If I say" John owns 10 Ferraris", this is a statement. It's a statement about ten cars in John's ownership. But in reality, John doesn't actually own Ferraris. So, we can make statements about nonexistent things. And that's exactly what Satoshi's software does. After POW, this software writes that John, that is, his blockchain address, has quantity xx of a thing that Satoshi named Bitcoin. But John is not able to show xx Bitcoins the same as he is not able to show 10 Ferraris in his ownership. All he can show are statements. Statements about nonexistent things.)


The illusory truth effect, refers to a phenomenon in which people, when hear the same false information repeated again and again, often come to believe it is true. Also, repetition of a such information increases its likelihood of being judged true. Even the most educated individuals are still prone to this effect. They may be skeptical of a false information the first time they hear it, but the more they are exposed to it, the more they start to feel like it’s true, and their previous knowledge is not able to prevent this. This effect is especially powerful in today’s times of social media, where it is incredibly easy for false information to spread quickly to millions and millions of people all over the world. Bitcoin is a textbook example of this effect in action. Namely, we are exposed to headlines like: “Large companies are now investing in Bitcoin”, “The value of Bitcoin has risen ” or “Tesla bought bitcoin”. We talk about Bitcoin. We know there are millions upon millions of dollars involved around Bitcoin. We read books and articles about Bitcoin. And so on. However, all the things just mentioned rest on the information that Bitcoin exists. While in reality, there is no such thing as Bitcoin. If you think that Bitcoin exists you are the victim of the illusory truth effect. Everyone that makes headlines like the above, writes books or articles about Bitcoin, is victim as well. The information on Bitcoin’s existence has been repeated so many times that nobody is aware of the fact that this information if entirely false. Here, we will show that Bitcoin is a fictional or nonexistent thing. That nobody ever bought or sold Bitcoin. And that all people have ever done in this whole Bitcoin thing is transfer false statements on quantity created by a computer program of an anonymous author.

The best way to start explaining the nonexistence of Bitcoin is via an example. Suppose you are a business owner and you receive a digital invoice from your software supplier. The invoice lists a dozen items. Upon inspection of the list, you notice the item named “Microsoft Office 2019 license” with the quantity “10” next to it, and you realize that you never bought the licenses. You neither ordered nor received them. Licenses in the said quantity never came into the possession of your company. So, what the supplier did is sent you fake digital data (fake quantity). Fake, because the data informs you that you got digital asset (licenses) in a specific quantity, while in fact you didn’t get them. Exactly the same thing is happening in the world of Bitcoin. Namely, an anonymous author called Satoshi Nakamoto wrote a computer program that sends quantity data to the virtual addresses of people who maintain a database with these quantities and addresses. The database is called blockchain, while the maintainers are called miners. The said data informs the miners that they got specific quantity of a “digital asset” called Bitcoin. Bitcoin is supposed to be the payment for the miners, their reward for the maintenance. But here we have the same problem as in the invoice example. The miners never get Bitcoins. They only get quantity data on Bitcoins. The same as your company got quantity data on licenses but not the licenses themselves. And although in that example, the invoice quantity data was fake, we at least know what the Microsoft Office licenses are. Here, we have blockchain quantity data, but nobody even knows what Bitcoin is. Nobody knows to what thing in the real world this quantity data belongs. Only name was given to it: “Bitcoin”. Generally speaking, quantity is defined as the amount of something. So here, “something” is Bitcoin. But besides the amount and address in the blockchain, nothing exists anywhere that is in the ownership of address holders. So, what the Satoshi’s computer program sends to miner’s addresses is fake quantity data. Data on a fictional thing called Bitcoin. And from miner’s addresses, such data is then transferred to the addresses of other blockchain members. If you are one of the members, and you see “0.54” and “BTC” in your wallet, “0.54” is supposed to be the quantity of Bitcoin, and “BTC” a short name for it. But if one were to now ask you, where is the thing in your ownership that has quantity “0.54” and name “BTC” you wouldn’t be able to show it. That’s because Bitcoin doesn’t exist. Simply, what you have in your wallet is quantity of a fictional or nonexistent thing.

Generally speaking, what Satoshi Nakamoto did is pretty trivial. He wrote a computer program through which he is saying something to people. He is saying it in the form of quantity data. In our invoice example, your software supplier also said something to you in the form of quantity data – that your company got licences in a specific quantity. Data is simply a statement expressed formally. So, what Satoshi Nakamoto does with his computer program, is formally saying to blockchain address holders that they got Bitcoins in a specific quantity. But saying something doesn’t make it true. The same as your software supplier must prove that your company gained ownership of their licences, otherwise their statement is false, Satoshi Nakamoto must also prove that blockchain address holders gain ownership of his Bitcoins. But he is obviously not able to do that given that address holders got nothing from Satoshi except his quantity data, that is, his statements. That’s why Satoshi’s statements in the blockchain are false. Simply put, Satoshi instructed his computer program to tell lies to people. He instructed it to store fake quantity data. And doing something like that is what almost everyone can do. After all, that’s why we have the explosion of crypto currencies, or more precisely, the explosion of fancy names and fake quantity data. All that crypto creators do through their crypto softwares is telling lies to people.

Many people are lured into this whole crypto thing because the quantities between crypto accounts are transferred the same way as quantities between banking accounts. This creates the illusion that it’s all about sending and receiving quantities. That it is all about transferring data. But, nothing could be further from the truth. Namely, when people have quantities in their bank accounts they own something that actually exists, something that can be shown. They own debt. And this debt is paid to them in the form of goods, services, or labor provided by the borrowers. Here’s how. In a banking system, new quantities are crated when banks grant loans to the borrowers. Borrowers get quantities on paper bills or on deposit accounts. This is how debt is created. Once created, the investors invest in this debt. How they invest? Well, they trade goods, services, or labor with the borrowers. In that way the investors get quantities on deposit accounts, or on paper bills. So, if you have a positive balance in your bank account, or a paper bill in your hand, you essentially invested in the debt of the borrowers. Once the debt is in the market, the quantities are traded between the investors and this is how the debt ownership changes hands. Finally, given that there is debt owed to the investors, this debt gets paid back. How it gets paid back? Well in the same way it was invested in it – through the trade of goods, services, or labor. Namely, borrowers need back the quantities they previously traded because they are required (forced via collateral) to repay their loans. In order to get the quantities back, they trade their goods, services or labor with the investors. And this is how they pay the debt to the investors. Once the debt is paid, the borrowers have the quantities needed to repay their loans. With the loan repayments the quantities went back to the banks that created them. In that way, the quantities are withdrawn form circulation. With new loans, quantities are put back into circulation, and the whole process of debt creation, debt investment and debt payment repeats itself.

As we can see, when people transfer data from one banking account to another, what they actually transfer is the ownership of debt. The quantity data itself only represents or quantifies the debt, and without debt, there wouldn’t be data. So in the case of banking accounts we have two things: digital data (quantities), and intangible asset (debt ownership). Debt ownership is the thing that actually exists. That’s why we call it an asset. Asset is something that exists. On the other hand, in the case of crypto accounts we have digital data (quantities), but the thing on which the data is supposed to be, is nonexistent. And this nonexistent thing is given a name: Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Litecoin, whatever. So, when you think that you bought some crypto currency, you haven’t actually bought a currency. Only fake quantity data was sent to your address. Crypto currencies are fictional. They exist only in imagination, like Harry Potter or Starship Enterprise.

With that said it is easy to figure out what the crypto schemes are all about. They are about getting existent things in the exchange for nonexistent ones. Fancy names and fake quantity data are the tricks how to get them. You simply write a computer program that stores quantity data into a database and then you invent some fancy name to create the illusion that there is an existent thing behind the quantity. Then, you convince people of your creation being digital, because nowadays, calling something “digital” implies that it is new, innovative and revolutionary. You also convince them that your creation is an “asset”, “money” or “currency”. You even convince them to spend enormous amounts of electricity to keep your scheme running. Then, people start giving you the existent things (goods, debt ownership, company ownership, …) or provide you services or labor. And all you do in return, is sending them fake quantity data created out of thin air by your computer program. How is all that possible? Well, it is possible because people are the victims of the illusory truth effect. They hear the repetition of a specific name again and again, for e.g. “Bitcoin”, and they come to believe there’s an existent thing behind the name, such as currency, commodity, money, digital asset, tokens, coins, etc. When in reality, there is nothing except fake quantity data.

The same is true for investing. People hear the repetition of a phrase “investing in Bitcoin”, and they come to believe that actual investing is going on. While in reality all people are doing is paying off the existing blockchain members, and then wait for new members to pay them off the same way. Paying off the existing members is obviously not the definition of investing. The definition of investing is when investors put their assets, services or labor in an existent thing form which they can then expect the return. We saw that in fiat currencies, they put them in debt of the borrowers (existent thing), and their investment is then returned as goods, services, or labor provided by the borrowers. In stocks, they put them in a company (existent thing) and their investment is then returned as dividend, buyback value or liquidation value paid by the company. In bonds, they put them in debt of the bond issuer (existent thing), and their investment is then returned as principal paid by the issuer. In gold, they put them in a precious metal (existent thing), and their investment is then returned as usage of that metal in jewelry, electronics, computers, dentistry, medicine, aerospace, etc. So in actual investments, the investors can return their investment from the thing they invested in. They are not condemned to wait for new members to pay them off. That is why we can say that one invested in fiat currencies, stocks, bonds or gold. On the other hand, we cannot say that one invested in Bitcoin. It is impossible to invest in something that doesn’t exist.

With all that said, it is obvious why the whole Bitcoin scheme is a ticking bomb that can go off at any time. Namely, we have the whole army of members who put the existent things in the scheme (miners alone put in about 130 terawatts of electricity a year). Alternatively, members put in services or labor. All these people expect the existent things, services or labor back. Because, by being blockchain members they own none of the above. That is why they desperately need new members who will voluntary enter the scheme and provide them the said things. Meaning, the existing army of people requires another army of people to pay them off. But, as the first army grows, there are less members to form the second army. Eventually, the turning point will happen, people will realize what is going on, and no one will be willing to become the blockchain member anymore. Then, the whole scheme will collapse and the existing members will be left with nothing.

To conclude, the illusory truth effect, together with the tricks of fancy name and fake quantity data, created the illusion of the existence of a thing called Bitcoin. For that reason, people thought that the whole thing differs from classical Ponzi or pyramid schemes, where nothing exists to pay off the existing members, and thus, a constant influx of new members is required. But, as it turns out, exactly this is the case with Bitcoin scheme. Nobody can be paid off from blockchain membership because nothing exists behind the fancy name and quantity data. That is why a constant influx of new members is required to pay the existing ones off. All schemes where the existing members can be paid off only from the inputs of new members, eventually come to a turning point after which they collapse. Bitcoin scheme, and all crypto schemes for that matter, will come to this point as well. It is just a matter of time.