2. Just DNA life is bound to happen, given a primordial soup.

3. Life is common in the Universe, and technology wielding life is common, and they have spread through their home galaxy in a diaspora.

3. Even a moderate fraction of light speed is not possible. Consider our technology. Our fastest spacecraft would require something like 70,000 years to reach the nearest star, and it's only 4.5 light years away, as opposed to stars in our own galaxy that are nearly a hundred thousand light years away. Still, consider generation ships migrating outwards, or utilizing the resources in the Oort Cloud to hop our away across the void between the stars the way the Pacific Islands were colonized.

Here's a very sobering thought, though. If we're all descendants from the same species of microscopic DNA based life, then it seems that it only happened once. Why aren't there other descendants from other primordial microscopic forms of life on Earth?

You can also make a joint from a dollar bill. That is also a use other than as a currency. Does that make dollars a commodity?

What are bitcoins units of? Can you offer a non-circular definition?

When Bitcoin started it was basically just an experiment. I don't really see any "novelty" use of Bitcoin.

Hmmmm - if you were the only one in the world to have gold, would it not be similarly worthless? One can derive aesthetic value from gold, but a computer nerd can similarly derive tech-geek aesthetic value from Bitcoins. Indeed, before BTC had a market price, people traded them because they are cool - there is an aesthetic property to Bitcoin as a thing, just like a shiny stone or metal.

And further, it is not true that Bitcoin has "no" value other than money. There are a few weird uses people have mentioned - a timestamp, a means of anonymous proof of various info, a distributed record keeper, and certainly others we haven't considered.

So while bitcoin's value may be due 99.999% to its usefulness as money, it has some tiny fraction of value beyond that. Does that not then satisfy your commodity definition? Let's remember too that gold's value is vastly due to its use as money and a store of value (which derives in turn from its usefulness as money). If jewelry and industry were the only uses of gold, it's price would be vastly lower, probably in the single digits of what it is now.

So what then is the fundamental difference that makes gold a commodity money, but not bitcoin? Both are commodity monies in my opinion, the former a physical commodity and the later a digital commodity.

Bitcoin is *effectively* a currency because that is what it does and how people use it. Although, it does have some special properties that make it a very novel and unusual type of currency.

A commodity always has a use by itself. If gold were not used as medium of exchange or storage of value it would still be useful because you can make useful things with it, such as electronics and jewelry.

Bitcoin does not have that property.

If I were the only person in the world to have Bitcoins it would be useless, just as with any other currency.

Tell me what the bitcoins themselves are useful for beyond a unit of exchange.

Those are not uses for bitcoin, nor the bitcoin network at present

Honestly, I know it's an impossible task, as I have already mentioned, bitcoins don't really exist.

No, there are no tokens, not even in the transactions.  There are only the transactions, with entries on who is sending bitcoins to whom (via addresses) and how much.  That is all.

I'm going to have to dissent here for technical reasons.  In reality, bitcoins are no more than a mental construct.  They don't even exist as a digital object.  Only transactions exist, and they are not, themselves, bitcoins.  There is only the accounting system.

Tell me what other use bitcoins serve and I'll agree that it's a commodity.

Consider the amoeba. It is a single celled organism with no neurons at all. Yet under my microscope I can watch them hunt, avoid things, even make choices about what to do next. How?