A Simple Reason Why Bitcoin is not Money

[Ruttoshi]

A) Why's Bitcoin not money?
Because it is purposeless. Meaning, when bitcoins are bought they can never be used for anything, and whoever holds them must ultimately sold them - dump them on someone else.

Due to the lack of a purpose whose fulfilment would generate a specific amount of benefit, there's no pivot for estimating how many bitcoins to accept for goods or services and is, thus, impossible to perform a rational trade.

Bitcoin is money and it can be used to pay for goods and services worldwide, as long as it is been accepted. It is not compulsory for you to buy your bitcoin and hodli, you can still use your bitcoin to pay directly for whaever you want to buy either online or offline. I have a hotel down here that accepts bitcoin payment.

You should also know the purpose why Satoshi created bitcoin, it was for an alternative payment method but because bitcoin is limited in supply, as time passes, it started to increase in value and that is why people now see it as an investment and they prefer to hodli rather than using it for payment because they want to make profit from bitcoin. My uncle bought his PC with bitcoin, and we in this forum do business with bitcoin here. In the nearest future, you will understand what bitcoin is. Ferrari just started accepting bitcoin payment for the purchase of their exotic car.

If you want to pay for any goods or services with bitcoin, you will charge in dollar and convert to bitcoin. That is how it is done because every goods and services have their price or fee.

https://newsdirect.com/news/who-accepts-bitcoin-as-payment-10-best-online-stores-and-companies-that-accept-cryptocurrency-778803188

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[lombok]

Let's return to the discussion of money and the OP's question about why Bitcoin is not money. For me, Bitcoin is money that can be used as a medium of exchange to buy goods for those who use it.

Bitcoin is money where the country legalizes Bitcoin as a legal means of payment. However, if it is used in a country that prohibits Bitcoin as a means of payment, it means that Bitcoin is not money, but a commodity or something else according to the laws and regulations of that country.

[seoincorporation]

If Bitcoin is not money, then what is it? Well, it is a means of recording membership in some kind of decentralized and self-governing pyramid scheme.

Just to be clear, Bitcoin is Money in El Salvador, they consider BTC as money in a legal way, but there are not many countries that follow this practice.

The fact that you call Bitcoin a decentralized pyramid scheme only shows you high levels of ignorance and i highly recommend you to understand what's a pyramid scheme to understand why Bitcoin is not one of them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme

[Lucius]

A) Why's Bitcoin not money?
Because it is purposeless. Meaning, when bitcoins are bought they can never be used for anything, and whoever holds them must ultimately sold them - dump them on someone else.
~snip~

It doesn't make much sense to try to have any kind of meaningful discussion with this troll who has been writing the same nonsense for years using various accounts, and he is especially nervous when the price of BTC rises, since he lives for the moment to see how the whole thing failed.

Writing that Bitcoin is used only for trading is complete nonsense, because there are so many online stores where you can pay for various goods and services with it, and there are also people who travel the world and pay exclusively with Bitcoin.

I know it doesn't make much sense to fight single-minded trolls, but anyone who has ever bought Bitcoin can spend it -> https://spending-bitcoin.com

[Casdinyard]

Bro is living in his own imaginary world where bitcoin is only used for investments lololol. Wakey wakey eggs and bakey. The real world is already using bitcoin as a form of payment, and that alone is enough to ruin your whole wall of text that you prolly did with ChatGPT's heavy lifting. Maybe use a different argument other than "Bitcoin's not being used to purchase for shit huhuhu therefore it can't be considered money" When it couldn't be farther from the truth. From the get-go bitcoin has been used to pay for shit, ever remember about Laszlo and his pizza purchase? Or the millions of purchases made under bitcoin's economy? What of the country of El Salvador using bitcoin as a form of currency right now? We just gonna sweep that under the rug?

[bitzizzix]

Let's return to the discussion of money and the OP's question about why Bitcoin is not money. For me, Bitcoin is money that can be used as a medium of exchange to buy goods for those who use it.

I'm sure almost everyone knows that Bitcoin is money or a transaction tool in the form of a new digital currency or you could say electronic money, and this digital currency is famous throughout the world.
And if a country legalizes it, Bitcoin will definitely become legal money like money that can be used as a medium of exchange like money in that country or as an alternative to money. And even though countries do not allow Bitcoin to be used as money, they can still carry out transactions using Bitcoin individually or secretly. And most people cannot use Bitcoin as a transaction tool like money, due to regulations and laws in each country.

[Learn Bitcoin]

A) Why's Bitcoin not money?
Because it is purposeless. Meaning, when bitcoins are bought they can never be used for anything, and whoever holds them must ultimately sold them - dump them on someone else.

Due to the lack of a purpose whose fulfilment would generate a specific amount of benefit, there's no pivot for estimating how many bitcoins to accept for goods or services and is, thus, impossible to perform a rational trade.

And what is the purpose of the gold actually? Making jewellery? Gold has a similar nature to Bitcoin, but it's centralized while Bitcoin is not. Why do you think it has no purpose while people can pay using Bitcoin to buy goods and other things on the internet. Of course, it's a form of money, and you can buy many things using Bitcoin these days.

What about the stock market? What is the purpose of it? Just manipulating the rates and making money out of it? Your arguments does not make sense to me. Maybe because I have low IQ.

[DooMAD]

So here we have the same problem as in my previous thread - the responders are ignoring my arguments and talk about completely irrelevant stuff.

Let's repeat the arguments in the simplest form.

A) Why's Bitcoin not money?
Because it is purposeless. Meaning, when bitcoins are bought they can never be used for anything, and whoever holds them must ultimately sold them - dump them on someone else.

Due to the lack of a purpose whose fulfilment would generate a specific amount of benefit, there's no pivot for estimating how many bitcoins to accept for goods or services and is, thus, impossible to perform a rational trade.

B) Why is Bitcoin a pyramid-style scheme?
Because whoever invested purposeful items in it cannot get such items back without new investors.

So, it's not about definitions. It's about reality. In reality Bitcoin is purposeless and existing investors need new investors to get out. Definitions cannot change reality.

Neither of those are the crux of your argument.  You're deflecting from your own point.  The argument you made in the OP is that only the symbiotic relationship with banks can supposedly legitimise money.  But the primary reason Bitcoin even exists in the first place is because those very banks delegitimised themselves by being reckless and crashing the global economy they're meant to co-depend upon.  The very foundations of money proved to be rotten, yet you laud them for it and act as though anything without their involvement somehow doesn't count for anything.

You can't cry foul when they dropped the ball, prompting us to try something different.  How can you claim we're making a mistake purely because we eliminated one of the ingredients that caused fiat to fail?  In fact, all of the largest issues faced by this community occur when people try to emulate the traditional banking system and create another central point of failure.  That's when Exchanges implode because they pull the same sorts of fractional reserve chicanery as fiat banks do.

Bitcoin proves that not only can money exist without banks, but it's actually better for it.  Just look at the current cost-of-living crisis.  This is what always happens when you place all your faith in banks and governments.  Ever-decreasing purchasing power and ever-weaker currency.  That's baked into their design.  We're not copying that.  

[m2017]

Money is defined as a commodity that can be used to buy any other commodity.

From the very beginning you have an erroneous understanding of the subject of discussion. Money is not a commodity, a means of exchange for commodity.

Or as a medium of exchange, a store of value and a unit of account.

And again. Money can't be a store of value due to the influence of inflation. Even in the old days, when money was in metal, governments carried out monetary reforms by issuing new coins and old money turned into just a piece of metal. Except when the coins were made of precious metals. Precious metals like gold or silver have always been and remain a store of value.

They say nothing about the most important thing - the value of money. How do we actually know the worth of money? That is, how can we, as market participants, determine how many monetary units are worth accepting for goods or services?

This is determined and decided by the market, that is, the commodity-money relations of market participants form precisely this “worth of money.”

Let's say you're selling a bicycle, and in return, a person offers you 100 units of something they call a 'medium of exchange'. Can that generic term tell you whether the exchange is worth it or not? Well, apparently not. On the one hand, you know that a bicycle is used for transportation, recreation, and sport and that its value depends on how well it serves those purposes.

The value of the bike will be higher the more you want it. Knowing about demand, sellers will increase the price. This is how the market works. Pay attention to the price of a bike out of season and in the summer season and you will notice the difference.

I'm tired of continuing to read this wall of text. Maybe you can learn to be more concise?

[Y3shot]

to correct the OP

currency is anything used as a medium of exchange

That's not correct!

Currency is not ANYTHING used as a medium of exchange, you can use many things as a medium of exchange which I'm sure is obvious around you. You can purchase your shoe and other products and properties with gold or other products and properties, which makes your definition faulty.

Currency is rather a LEGAL TENDER (fiat) note and others backed by the central bank of a country.

If currency is not anything used as medium of exchange,  so tell me what is your definition of currency? Their are so many features of currency which one of them is as medium of exchange which bitcoin has this feature and other better feature than other currencies. If you say a currency must be backed by government that means you are trying to say bitcoin is not a currency,  so far as bitcoin is solving the problem of people and its accepted by many these makes it a very good currency.  The quality bitcoin has as made it better than the currency back by the government.

[thecodebear]

Now we finally come to Bitcoin. Bitcoin is said to be money. But is that true? Given the above, we can determine this quite easily. All we need to do is answer the following question: can Bitcoin be used for a concrete, practical purpose besides being traded? And here the answer is resolutely - no. Namely, the way Bitcoin was created, is that its author came up with a protocol that assigns virtual points (bitcoins). Points are assigned to bitcoin addresses and stored in a peer-to-peer database. However, whichever owner of an address holds the points, cannot do anything with them except send them to another bitcoin address. They can only exchange them on the market, i.e. use them as a means of exchange. Therefore, no practical purpose exists for which bitcoins would be withdrawn from the market and whose fulfillment would generate a specific amount of benefit to the holders.

uhhh huh??

You wrote a lot just to get this fundamental point completely wrong. When you start with false premises, and your goal is to make a wrong conclusion, well...your diatribe is what ya get.


You can use bitcoin to buy things by giving the seller bitcoin and getting the product in return. Same way as you use a dollar or yen or peso or pound or whatever to buy things by giving the seller whichever currency and getting the product in return. Bitcoin is money. This is very easy to understand. Not sure how you messed this one up in your head haha. Basically what you argued in your post is that money isn't money haha

[Twentyonepaylots]

to correct the OP

currency is anything used as a medium of exchange

That's not correct!

Currency is not ANYTHING used as a medium of exchange, you can use many things as a medium of exchange which I'm sure is obvious around you. You can purchase your shoe and other products and properties with gold or other products and properties, which makes your definition faulty.

By the definition, currency is standardization of money in any form; and money is any item or record that is generally accepted as payment. Therefore currency could be anything you can use as a medium of exchange, if both end agreed to pay/exchange a cow for a chicken then it is a currency. I think this is a general misconception about the currency and money, I even confused these two at first honestly.

Currency is rather a LEGAL TENDER (fiat) note and others backed by the central bank of a country.

You are talking about country currency, well this one is regulated by the country's government to host and have an organize exchange and standardization. I can buy your car for my laptop as my currency, if you want to. Basically that's how currency works.

[Promocodeudo]

OP, Bitcoin is money, but if you say that is not a handy money, thats when no one will argue that fact, bitcoin is a digital money and it is been used for many stuff, the inflation of a things does not affect Bitcoin but it does affect fiat because fiat is a currency of a particular country and whenever a country is facing economic downtrend it drastically affects their currency because so money country will not be ready to invest in such a country that won't bring any return to them, if bitcoin is not money why is it a medium of exchange, why do we use it to purchase items online. I believe soon so many people will soon start accepting this currency openly and this will satisfy individuals' curiosity about it.

[tjtonmoy]

So here we have the same problem as in my previous thread - the responders are ignoring my arguments and talk about completely irrelevant stuff.

Let's repeat the arguments in the simplest form.

A) Why's Bitcoin not money?
Because it is purposeless. Meaning, when bitcoins are bought they can never be used for anything, and whoever holds them must ultimately sold them - dump them on someone else.

Due to the lack of a purpose whose fulfilment would generate a specific amount of benefit, there's no pivot for estimating how many bitcoins to accept for goods or services and is, thus, impossible to perform a rational trade.

B) Why is Bitcoin a pyramid-style scheme?
Because whoever invested purposeful items in it cannot get such items back without new investors.

So, it's not about definitions. It's about reality. In reality Bitcoin is purposeless and existing investors need new investors to get out. Definitions cannot change reality.

You are saying all this because people have created a connection to Bitcoin with Fiat money. If you think of Bitcoin as a unit that is 1 Bitcoin equals 1 Bitcoin then everything will become clear to you. Of course, we can use it as a mean of payment and extended for other things. Is it necessary for Bitcoin to become money? No! So what are we even talking about this?
And while you are talking about money, let's face it. Money is just a piece of paper and if person controlling its value decide that it is worthless then it will be worthless. It can be manipulated by the people who have the power.

We are able to exchange Bitcoin for other goods or services just as we can do with money. Bitcoin is bitcoin. I don't know why it needs to become money? You are talking about dumping it to someone else. When you are buying something with money aren't you dumping the worthless paper to someone else? How is this even different? Hope you answer this question.

[ZAINmalik75]

If Bitcoin is not money, then what is it? Well, it is a means of recording membership in some kind of decentralized and self-governing pyramid scheme. Members invest purposeful items in it - goods, services and money. They then get recorded by the peer-to-peer network with a certain number of points. Finally, they wait for new investors so they can get out of the scheme. Without new investors, they cannot get purposeful items back - which is how all pyramid schemes operate. Since the Bitcoin scheme is online and thus global, early members made huge profits, which caused great public interest and created a considerable membership base. It is estimated that today the scheme has more than 200 million members.

I think you are a little confused here because BTC is considered money or not, but it is not purposeless. Bitcoin has given people freedom of finance. In the whitepaper of BTC that you can access from the Bitcoin.org website, the creator of BTC, Satoshi, stated that BTC is made for p2p decentralized transactions where one has to not comply with any of the strict and ambiguous rules of banks, which they can change according to their needs. Check history. You will find out what I am talking about.

BTC does provide us with physical purpose, but not in your definition. I can buy those apples that you said have physical purpose, and I can buy that bicycle that also has physical purpose, like we can use it to travel long distances, etc. These are all physical purposes, but if we talk in the sense of money, like the dollar, that is also money but doesn't have any physical purpose. Instead, we can use them to make fire and heat ourselves.

BTC and fiat have become means of payment, which is not because at first things were exchanged like service for service or product for product. But now, for ease, money has been backed by the same amount of gold that we used to exchange back then, but now we have to include inflation too.

[hatshepsut93]

All we need to do is answer the following question: can Bitcoin be used for a concrete, practical purpose besides being traded? And here the answer is resolutely - no.

First, yes - Bitcoin sometimes is used for payments. Not often, but still far from never.

Second - gold is no longer used for payments, but it's still money - it's something that has value, has liquidity, retains its value, and is actually used as a store of value. Bitcoin shares these properties with gold.

Bitcoin could be overpriced because too many investors only buy it to sell later for a profit, but it's still very far from worthless - if Bitcoin's price was constant, it would still be owned by a lot of people who need its properties.

[Dr.Bitcoin_Strange]

It works as money because it is exchanged but is not money because it is purposeless.

Trying to rap my head around this, I couldn't figure out any reason for this statement. I only came up with one question for you after thinking hard. The question is, what has the real money done that Bitcoin has not done? Value is placed on money as a means of exchange, the same as Bitcoin. You can stack up your Fiat in banks for the purpose of a fixed deposit with an expectation of profit; that's also what most centralized exchanges are practicing, but I will not advise you to save your Bitcoin on centralized exchanges. Some people accept Bitcoin as a means of payment, just like Fiat money. So, back to my question: what has Fiat money done that Bitcoin has not done? Feel free to quote me.

[JamesNZ]

This is becoming bizarre. Literally all responders vehemently refuse to address the argument even when it was expressed in the simplest possible form. And they just talk about irrelevant stuff, do ad hominem attacks, or misrepresented the argument.

Let's me repeat the crux of the argument:

Due to the lack of a practical purpose whose fulfilment would generate a specific amount of benefit, there's no pivot for estimating how many bitcoins to accept for goods or services and it is impossible for market participants to perform a rational trade.

Just repeating the mantra: Bitcoin is money, Bitcoin is money, Bitcoin is money .... cannot change the above described reality.

 

[Y3shot]

OP, Bitcoin is money, but if you say that is not a handy money, thats when no one will argue that fact, bitcoin is a digital money and it is been used for many stuff, the inflation of a things does not affect Bitcoin but it does affect fiat because fiat is a currency of a particular country and whenever a country is facing economic downtrend it drastically affects their currency because so money country will not be ready to invest in such a country that won't bring any return to them, if bitcoin is not money why is it a medium of exchange, why do we use it to purchase items online. I believe soon so many people will soon start accepting this currency openly and this will satisfy individuals' curiosity about it.

I think Bitcoin is a better form of money than fiat because it is a kind of money that the value can't be manipulated. One of the reasons fiat do not have value is excessive printing of copies and this makes it to lose value . The fiat is a kind of money that is affected with by inflation.  Bitcoin is volatile which enables people to invest in it when the price is low to hodl till when the price is increase for good profit to be made . The value of bitcoin can't be compared to that of fiat, I think this makes it a good currency because it is playing a good role to investors financially.

[NotATether]

This word salad doesn't look like a "simple reason".

Tell you what - I can use Bitcoin however the hell I want to use it. Whether that be by paying someone with it, or inscribing random files like JPEGs and junk text with something like BRC-20 (although I do not find that idea interesting), or by sending a message to somebody on the blockchain using OP_RETURN.

You cannot dictate what other people use their coins for, and your pseudo-analysis doesn't change that.