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When Satoshi Nakamoto introduced Bitcoin, he claimed it was a payment system, a means for conducting transactions. However, a transaction presupposes that something is being transferred. Payment is impossible if there is no object of payment, something that goes from one party to another.
Yet, it is precisely the object of payment that is missing from Satoshi’s creation. His system merely maintains a decentralized list showing which numbers are assigned to which cryptographic keys.
People began joining this system by spending electricity to obtain these number assignments and paying to have them reassigned. From that point onward, a mass collective illusion has taken hold: participants began to believe they had actually received something in proportion to those numbers, even though it is obvious that nothing is there.
They often believe they own something digital. They say, for example, "I bought 3 digital coins," "I hold 10 units of digital assets," or "I received digital money." But in reality, a person whose cryptographic key is assigned the number "10" cannot point to 10 distinct files, data structures, or software products. There are no digital objects that can be bought, held, or received.
It is even clearer that there is nothing physical. Despite the common visual portrayal of Bitcoin as metal coins stamped with symbols, and despite frequent comparisons to commodities like gold, no ten tangible units of any kind are stored or reserved for the person whose key holds the number “10.”
Most often, however, participants believe they hold something similar to fiat money, e-money issued by companies like PayPal, tokens, or even stocks. However, in all those cases, people hold legal instruments in the form of records of obligation and receive returns from the obligor.
This return can be direct or indirect. Stocks represent a company’s obligation to its shareholders. When companies decide to distribute profits, carry out share buybacks, or liquidate the business, they are legally required to make direct payments to shareholders. PayPal’s e-money and tokens like casino chips represent the issuer’s obligation to redeem them for a specified amount of fiat money.
In other cases, the return is indirect. Fiat money is created through bank lending, which means borrowers are legally obligated to repay banks. The only way they can fulfill that obligation is by producing goods, providing services, or offering labor to those who hold fiat money, and, if the borrower is the government, by enabling the settlement of tax liabilities with that money. If borrowers fail to meet their obligations, banks seize their property and offer it at auction to holders of money. Thus, although holders have no direct claims against individual borrowers or banks, they ultimately receive goods, services, labor, tax settlements, and seized property from them precisely because they hold a record of existing legal obligations.
In the Bitcoin system, no such record exists. There is no party that bears an obligation and that will provide a return, directly or indirectly, to those who control the cryptographic keys.
Therefore, there is no digital, physical, legal, or any other kind of thing in proportion to the numbers assigned to those keys. There is no object of payment. Since the numbers do not represent a balance of anything, Satoshi’s decentralized list is not a ledger, and the system itself is not a payment system.
What people call mining and trading are simply people giving up existing things (electricity, money) in exchange for updated number assignments, with no “something” received in return. All beliefs that participants “own” digital coins, digital assets, digital gold, or anything else are collective fantasies and self-deception.
Here it is irrelevant whether the Bitcoin software protocol works technically, whether the list of numbers is consistent, or whether people can agree to pay high market prices to those numbers. The protocol and the network merely maintain the shared illusion. The numbers themselves have no proportion to any evaluable thing, so there is nothing to assess for value in the first place.
The entire Bitcoin project, from Satoshi’s original claim of creating a payment system onward, is built on this absence. Participants have entered a state of massive collective illusion, pretending that controlling larger numbers on the list equates to holding more of something substantive. But there is nothing at all.
Bitcoin’s technical properties (decentralization, immutability, hashrate security, etc.) only protect and propagate this empty number-assignment game. They do not create or track any “thing” that could be owned.
Everything about Bitcoin is collective self-deception. It is a grand illusion that has attracted individuals, companies, financial institutions, and even governments. How long it will last is unknown, but one thing is certain: in the long run, it is unsustainable to trade something for nothing.