>> and in fact, from cryptographic perspective it's not money at all, it's document timestamping service. > I'm not sure that's mutually exclusive or that that

>> and in fact, from cryptographic perspective it's not money at all, it's document timestamping service. > I'm not sure that's mutually exclusive or that that's a useful distinction, unless the point is that Bitcoin/blockchains can also be easily used for timestamping. Money is a token that can only be spent once by its current owner, and for verification it doesn't need knowledge about all the other tokens. There were attempts at designing cyrptographic protocol for money, and they had this property baked in at the cryptography level. Bitcoin's spending verification is placed not in the cryptographic protocol, but higher, in the protocol protected by the cryptographic protocol. Thus, Bitcoin is not money, but document timestamping. Money has different cryptographic properties, and Bitcoin implements money on top of document timestamping. People untrained in cryptography (and thus the ones unqualified to touching the protocol part) usually mistake one for the other, and are usually heavily surprised that you can do document timestamping with Bitcoin, which was designed specifically for that.