>Let's say I have a customer who pays me, and I pay a bunch of employees or contractors who helped me deliver services to that customer, keeping some profit for

>Let's say I have a customer who pays me, and I pay a bunch of employees or contractors who helped me deliver services to that customer, keeping some profit for myself. Does that have no economic value? Because that's what mining pools do. Again we're really getting hung up on the term 'economic.' Okay you're the pool, you receive 50 BTC and you pay 45 of that out to miners. Have we transacted 95 BTC or 50 BTC? Is the 'economic value' of our transaction 50 or 95? The best thing is it doesn't even matter what you answer because what's best for everyone is if we know both numbers. Right now all parties interested in BTC can see is the 95. But if I'm investing in BTC I don't care about the 95, I care about the 50 because 50 tells me how much BTC actually changed hands here. And this firm is just trying to find all the double counting and completely fake transactions and remove them from our number. >There is no order book on Bitcoin, Ethereum, and others. The order books are on web based exchanges I mean yeah? I don't understand what difference you're trying to draw here. >yeah, there's a lot of fake trading >It's just shifting balances in some centralized database. Exactly and it's the same way in a mining pool as per the above example. 45 BTC is getting counted twice because we shifted it twice.