Bartering goods/commodities IS pretty much what money is. Only it makes more sense to barter something that's fungible, which is why most currencies in history

Bartering goods/commodities IS pretty much what money is. Only it makes more sense to barter something that's fungible, which is why most currencies in history have been some kind of commodity, like some form of metal, and scarce, like some form of precious metal. Only recently have we been able to create scarcity out of other materials like paper by putting unique identifier marks on them, so that only a small percentage of the paper supply can be money and only the government has (or tries to, anyway) the technology to mark paper with those identifiers (i.e. printing money). Bitcoin is merely the digital variant of that, it's not a physical commodity, it's a scarce and relatively fungible digital entry in a database which can represent money or anything else of value we want to. I don't see how you can say it doesn't fit the definition of money. Whether it's used popularly mainly as money or mainly as an asset class for investment is a different question, and the answer seems overwhelmingly the latter (although it's getting less lopsided every year). But even here, the two aren't mutually exclusive. An Apple I in a museum is both a museum piece as well as a computer, even if it's exclusively used as the former and rarely as the latter, and these two conditions aren't mutually exclusive.