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A bitcoin represents a portion of the blockchain, the dominant distributed-consensus protocol. Since the ability to do blockchain-stuff that takes a huge amount
by ThrustVectoring 11y ago
A bitcoin represents a portion of the blockchain, the dominant distributed-consensus protocol. Since the ability to do blockchain-stuff that takes a huge amount of processing power to revert is valuable economic activity, bitcoin is basically a cryptographic commodity.
- nickff 11y agoWhat you are saying is that bitcoin is a claim on the use of the blockchain, and that the blockchain is a resource. This is not incompatible with the bitcoin itself being money. A US Dollar can buy you a computer which has a huge amount of processing power, but the dollar is no commodity, though the processor may be.
- mikekchar 11y agoJust off the top of my head, I'm not sure that the blockchain itself could be seen as a resource. However, the mining pool that makes transactions happen (and expensive to cheat) could certainly be seen as a resource. In fact, one might be able to make an argument that the overall mining hashrate sets an upper bound on the value of BTC. It would be related to the cost of the CPU resources necessary to cheat.
- ThrustVectoring 11y agoYeah, `/s/blockchain/mining pool` on my original statement. The mining hashrate also helps set the value of BTC in my model as well - it means that other valuable activities can piggyback on the hard-to-forge nature of the blockchain.
- icebraining 11y ago"A portion of the blockchain"? How so? The blockchain stores transactions, not Bitcoins.
- SeeDave 11y agoAs a bitcoin 'owner' you have the right to mark the transfer of unspent transaction outputs from one or more addresses to one or more other addresses in the blockchain.