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Bitcoin is Not a Commodity... Again!

In the world of Bitcoin theres one form of Bitcoin whose followers claim its is a commodity and not a security. They say making it essentially different having a unique utility and not subject to registration with the financial authorities.

I don't agree with this claim yet. And am asking them to step back for a moment and while their current world view is suspended, place their claim under serious objective scrutiny. If they do and nothing new is found then no harm done. Release the suspension and go back to were we were. But as usual this is an ideological question and those things do not bear scrutiny well by their supporters. 

Money is not a material world thing - its just an idea, credit, trust a promise to pay. It is sourced in our imagination and never actually touches the material world.

And money despite its reputation has great utility. But because its source comes from our imagination we cannot touch and feel it. So we create proxies for it, tokens - bits of paper, metal, binary digits. This is a fantastic invention behaves economically like an enormous labour saving device, boosting productivity to new heights. And the better the money is functioning in that time and place generally, the greater and sooner the boost.

So the governing authority which picks on the best money first will be the first to benefit the most. And more still, because the money is 'the' most exchanged thing, it is the most important and first thing which should be adopted and focused on economically and made to work properly and justly by a group of people or nation or world.

These money tokens, not the idea of money which is the real money - the bits of paper, metal, binary digits are also items of material wealth. They have been produced by the inputs of labour and capital just like all other items of wealth, as outputs of money tokens. We use them as proxies for the real money because these particular items of wealth are the most exchanged things. Meaning everyone implicitly and immediately knows their value without needing to directly measure them. This quality makes them the current money tokens everyone will automatically use in this time and place. If a new form of money toke gets discovered which raises the bar in this respect, that will soon become the most exchanged thing and the new money.

Will that be Bitcoin it remains to be seen in the darkness of the old guard who are trying hard to stop it as we see the COPA trial play out favouring them most generously?

Dr. Wright correctly, corrected me somewhat when I spoke to him about this a day before the trial saying "but a commodity is a certain known measure of an item of wealth, you are wrong, I want to talk more but do not have time" .

Nice, agreed. But still, a commodity is still material wealth from production inputs except in a well measured amount, its still not the money itself which is just an idea as we show above. And an idea which delivers great utility too. The commodity is still a material world 'thing' not the money itself. 

People then who find thought and scrutiny of their ideas a challenge go on to say "but this is just sophistry" (one for slictionary)

I say NO! This is a deadly serious matter to be understood, for the world. Because once people start believing that an idea is wealth, then you can create as much as it as you want from nothing. And worse. You can start to say that even human bodies are tradable.

So, in the end, you can either 

  1. use 'up' an item of wealth say like food by eating it or gold by wearing it - value in use
  2. or use it in a circle of exchanges to 'buy' other items of wealth - value in exchange
But there is no way in this universe, yet, to be able to do both things at the same time with the same thing. We do not yet know how to travel back and forth across time(if that is time even exists and is not another fabrication of our imagination). We know this. A small chid knows this.

So its my view this idea that Bitcoin is a commodity needs more scrutiny. With our views on it and the Howey test suspended for long enough to look at it objectively. Who knows, there might be something far more important going on with Bitcoin here than we already think. But our focus on this is blocking our vision.

Is an amazing world we live in. Productivity is now so high due to cooperation and technology, that even the most useless administration cannot bring it down any more. But we the people have to find a way to discover a government which is closer to a model of purity and thrift if we want to assure the distribution of wealth becomes one of justice. And this fantastic invention we call money is purely beneficial. 

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