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I can see this around sometimes when I browse the internet. Is it really true?

I was browsing around some alt coin threads today and saw maxvest.io come up. I joined the site and it seems it's paying.

I tried it small to test:


Anyone else heard of it?

If you reverse the logic of this sentence would it make sense?

I give up - you win.

You get the relationships wrong. Here's the correct answer:
For something to have value it must be valuable.
For something to be broken it must be breakable.

I am illustrating to you that characteristics do not mandate treatment. Doing otherwise would fall in line with a naturalistic fallacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy) which you seem to be doing here. Property is not purely derived from physical characteristics but is bound by social standards. However, you can establish which characteristics are necessary for something to act as property - and that's what was done in part in the manuscript which was cited earlier.

You don't get it. I can't help you. Note the subtle difference between "treated as" and "are".

Bullshit. For something to be property, it requires a claim of ownership. For something to be ABLE to be property is has to possess characteristics which enable the establishment of ownership. The first requires the second to be true - not the other way around. These are two disjunct propositions.

Otherwise I must conclude that you - as a person - are property. Now - you may say to this is correct and you own yourself. However, the term property only makes sense in a relational manner. Thus a property belonging to itself doesn't make any sense.
Also the association of people with property is kind of outlawed in modern society which abandoned slavery. Apparently some societies eventually decided that there are certain things which SHOULD NOT be claimable as property.

I think bitcoins possess key characteristics to establish ownership, and thus can serve as property in the common sense. And because it can, it will be treated as property.

No - as mentioned above I think bitcoins are information about rights which full-fill the key characteristics we associate with property. The novelty about bitcoin versus other kinds of digital content (e.g. music files) is that ownership is enforceable through the PKI. If you need a law which prohibits others from using your digital content there is not a strong sense of ownership - it's like trying to sell 2 hours of sunlight a day - you don't own the sun - but you may be able to control the access to sunlight. But that doesn't mean it's not shining.

The problem I have with the way "intellectual property" is used is that it is applied towards items which do not possess key characteristics of properties out of the box. Then you have complicated laws and PIPA and SOPA which do more harm than good. Items which do not possess characteristics of property can be considered to be in the public domain, where you are the rightful person to receive monetary contributions. I think that's what Stallman is getting at. Punishing people for watching a movie, or sharing a song for free is nonsense if there was no intended money flow or business. It serves no purpose.

Anyway - that's all not a problem with bitcoin - because ownership can be enforced through PKI.

full-fill the key characteristics we associate with property

The term intellectual property is quite a fix.

From the wiki page:
Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman argues that, although the term intellectual property is in wide use, it should be rejected altogether, because it "systematically distorts and confuses these issues, and its use was and is promoted by those who gain from this confusion." He claims that the term "operates as a catch-all to lump together disparate laws [which] originated separately, evolved differently, cover different activities, have different rules, and raise different public policy issues" and that it creates a "bias" by confusing these monopolies with ownership of limited physical things, likening them to "property rights".[33] Stallman advocates referring to copyrights, patents and trademarks in the singular and warns against abstracting disparate laws into a collective term.

A song is to be protected by copyright.

One of the key characteristics of property seems to be that it is discernible.
E.g. I does make sense to say that a music file belongs to me, but it can not be that a song belongs to me. The former describes the physical representation of the song, the latter describes the information which is contained.

To translate this analogy to bitcoin, we may assume that the music file is something like an access key to the song. Without the file, I cannot retrieve the song. The key difference here is that a song is non-rivalrous information (because it can be consumed by more than one person at the same time), and thus strictly speaking can not be property. However, what we can say is that the music file represents a right to consume the song. Thus the argument is how that right was obtained. Bitcoin instead can be rivalrous information. Thus it fits better the description of property in the common language.

Thanks for all the thoughtful debate,


I have come to think of it as information and a right tracking system monitored through mathematics and validated on a P2P system confirmed by all users.  And the process we are going through now is an attempt to couple that system to represent economic contributions and withdrawals, so from our current perspective it helps to think of it as property but it is not in fact property, but more a participatory stewardship right.

So Bitcoins are information on the P2P network, when I get given Bitcoin's I never actually take position or ownership, I just get given a right to decide how to direct that information.  The idea as BTC as property is merely a convenient concept for relating my understanding to the meme of ownership.

LOL - talk about going to the nth degree. 

but seriously,  I was looking at the heist thread...

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=83794.0

and several of the heists claim the coins were either destroyed or effectively destroyed.  I can understand the latter because they can be made inaccessible, but how about the former?  How can Bitcoins be destroyed? 

It has value if it CAN be destroyed. Because loss is irreversible depreciation.

(I actually would add "destructibility" to one of the key characteristics of property, which is not quite orthogonal to "persistence" as referred to in the manuscript).

The problem with making value a defining characteristic is that it is subjective.  Something can have value to me, but to know one else.  Take your example, if no one bought your reaylscoins they could still be very valuable to you.  They represent time and effort you put into creating the fork and even have sentimental value.   

We can also see this with collectibles.  Have you ever seen the phrase, "I USED TO BE A MILLIONAIRE UNTIL MY MOM THREW OUT MY BASEBALL CARDS".  Well, to the mother that threw them out, they had no value. 

I agree that he is making an argument, but in order define a previously undefined phrase that definition must be proven.   

As far as value, VP is a general term to encompass Domain names, URLs, Bitcoins, etc.  The definition of the general term should not hinder the value of anything specific that falls under it's scope. 

If we were trying to define Bitcoins would you want to hinder the value by definition or allow the free market to determine that value.?

The paper establishes a scientific basis on what characteristics a virtual property must possess to be "comparable" to properties in the common sense. One of them is rivalrous, i.e. the CAPACITY for it to be restricted to one person only. This is provided by the bitcoin network, because an unspent output can be protected by secret keys, for an indefinite time (persistence...).

E.g. a music file CAN NOT be virtual property on that basis, because once it's copied you loose control over who has access, so you can not establish rivalrousness.  Thats why you need a different legal handle to protect artistic content.