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There is a popular myth that modern money is just numbers. This myth has been repeated for so long and so often that over time it started sounding like common-sense truth. And when such a delusion is taken seriously and literally, it does not remain theoretical. It begins to be lived. Bitcoin is precisely the embodiment of that delusion. It presents itself as a new kind of money, but in reality it is a new kind of absurdity. Never in economic history have people spent enormous amounts of energy and paid enormous sums just to protect and acquire something that is free to everyone and infinitely available.
To say that money is just a number is as absurd as saying that temperature is just a number, that speed is just a number, that weight is just a number, or that population is just a number. Yes, in all those cases we use numbers. But no one confuses the measurement with what is actually being measured. Temperature is not a number; it is a physical state. Speed is not a number; it is motion. Weight is not a number; it is mass in a gravitational field. Population is not numbers; it is people. Numbers are simply a way to express how much of something there is.
Numbers are used everywhere because they are the universal language of quantification. But nowhere do we create, store, or trade numbers themselves. We create, store, and trade what the numbers measure. The number is a label, not the content.
The same applies in economics. Economics always deals with something real. Either it is direct control over resources, such as food, energy, land, or gold, or indirect control over resources through obligations, such as stocks, contracts, and money. In both cases there is something that can ultimately be used. Numbers in economics always measure the amount of resources or the size of an obligation.
With commodity money this is obvious. If someone has ten grams of gold, the number measures the amount of a physical resource. With fiat money the matter is more abstract, but the structure is the same. Fiat money arises from debt and disappears with the repayment of debt. It is an instrument of obligation.
When your bank account or banknote shows a certain number, it does not tell you that you own a number. It tells you that someone, whether an individual, a company, or a state, has received credit from the banking system and that this credit must be closed. That debt cannot be closed with symbols, but only with real work, real resources, or real services. By holding fiat money, you hold an instrument of someone’s obligation. Whoever owes the banks must obtain that money from you to close the debt, and they can do so only by offering you something real.
That is why fiat money, although recorded in numbers, is not a number. It is expressed by a number, but it is an obligation that must be fulfilled. The number is the record. The debt is the content.
In Bitcoin, none of that exists.
In Bitcoin there is neither a resource that can be consumed nor an obligation that someone must fulfill. There is nothing that can be used beyond the record itself. There is only a distributed database in which, according to predefined rules, numbers are updated.
Numbers are by their nature free and infinitely available. If you want the number one, you write it. If you want it again, you write it again. If a million people want it, they can all have it at the same time. Numbers are not consumed. They do not disappear. They do not need protection because sharing them causes nothing to be lost.
And here we come to an unprecedented absurdity. For the first time in history, people are spending real resources to protect numbers. They spend energy, hardware, and time to restrict access to something that is by definition non-scarce. They are not protecting a resource or an obligation. They are protecting the record of a number.
Even further, people are willing to pay tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for the system to state that a certain number is linked to their cryptographic key. They are not buying land, a machine, or a claim on someone else’s labor. They are paying for an exclusive record of a symbol that is inherently available to everyone.
Such behavior is possible only because the wrong language is being used. People talk about coins, tokens, money, value, and ownership. Those words carry weight because historically they have always referred to resources or instruments of obligation. When we hear them, we automatically assume that the same thing stands behind them. In Bitcoin it does not. The words are parasitizing on the meaning they acquired in completely different systems.
If we remove the myth that money is just a number, the whole construction becomes clear. Bitcoin does not discover a new kind of resource nor a new kind of obligation. It tries to make a number valuable by making it expensive to maintain. It is not protecting something valuable; it hopes that the cost of protection will create the appearance of value.
Bitcoin is not a new technology of money nor a new phase of economic development. It does not represent a step forward, but the endpoint of one delusion. It is a system in which the error, that a number is the same as what the number measures, has been taken to its purest and most intense form. For the first time in history, something that is by its nature free and infinitely available is being seriously, systematically, and expensively protected and bought at extraordinary prices. That is not innovation, but absurdity in its most developed form.