People who have invested enormous amounts of electricity and capital to obtain records on the Bitcoin blockchain often justify their decision by pointing to fiat money. They argue that fiat currency is also merely a record, one that exists on paper or in a bank’s database, yet people routinely exchange it for goods and services.
However, the mere fact that something is a record is irrelevant. Records are everywhere: scientific data, sports results, meteorological measurements, stock ownership, and countless others. What truly matters is what the record represents and, most importantly, why anyone would pay for it.
Imagine you perform ten push-ups and write the number "10" on a piece of paper to represent this. That is also a record. Yet no one would pay you for it because the record is useless to them; it cannot benefit them.
By contrast, consider a record of stock ownership. People pay for it because it entitles the holder to future cash flows, which is a clear benefit. The same is true for fiat money. It represents a debt within the banking system that must ultimately be repaid, under the threat of losing assets or, in the case of governments, facing sovereign default. Holding fiat is beneficial because those who owe the banks must ultimately provide goods, services, or assets to settle that debt.
As we can see, a record in and of itself means nothing. What matters is what it represents.
So why do Bitcoin advocates constantly repeat the mantra that "fiat money is just a record"? It is to divert attention from what the Bitcoin record actually represents. In reality, it represents nothing more than the fact that computers expended energy and solved a cryptographic puzzle. That is all. It is simply a record of past computational activity in numerical form, just like the piece of paper noting ten push-ups. Such a record provides no benefit to anyone, whether it reads "0.001", "10", or "1,000". This is why it makes no sense to give even a dime for it.
How, then, is it possible that people invest substantial sums in it? Setting aside the most common reason, that many have simply seen others profit, the trick is that these records are wrapped in a shiny cellophane of technical features. They are decentralized, resistant to theft, limited in supply, and beyond government control.
These characteristics sound compelling, especially to those unfamiliar with the underlying reality. But they are no different from taking the record of ten push-ups, placing it inside the world’s most expensive and secure safe, hiding it from the government, and declaring that "10" is the highest number that can ever exist. None of these measures change the fundamental nature of the record. It remains nothing more than confirmation of past activity that creates no future benefits. No matter how sophisticated the packaging, it stays useless.
In the Bitcoin world today, people are giving around $70,000 for confirmation that a computer "did a push-up." They are replacing records that deliver future benefits with a useless record of computational effort, a mere digital phantom of an energy-intensive past. That is the absurdity of investing in Bitcoin.
The Absurdity of the Bitcoin Investor: Replacing Future Benefits for Past Phantoms
byu/BinaryLyric ininvesting
Posted by BinaryLyric
8 Comments
This is AI slop
a record, or any other thing for that matter, only has value when enough people agree it has value. the push up count on a piece of paper has no value to anyone other than your example – in your words it “is useless to them; it cannot benefit them.”
but bitcoin appeals to the values of some morons about decentralization, ownership, hardness, and freedom, and so they all subscribe to it.
same with pokemon ip, the emotional connection to made up critters gives the ip enough power that people justify to themselves spending 6 figs on a piece of cardboard.
bro the comparison between btc and push ups is actually a pretty brutal way to look at unproductive assets vs cash flow. at the end of the day if an asset doesn’t produce anything it eventually relies on finding someone else who likes the shiny packaging more than you did. sticking to companies with actual earnings might be less exciting but it is a lot easier to value than a digital phantom of spent energy.
Don’t you have any friends?
I agree that bitcoin strains to define itself. I can understand the desire for a currency free of goverment. But I think that one cannot have a currency without a government. And the condition of that government combined with scarcity of its currency = its value. And the condition of a government has direct relationship with the abilities of its military and defending itself. unfortunately, might does = power.
I also dont understand why a government, like the USA, would want anything to do with an alternative to its own currency. The US should NOT regulate it and not recognize it at all. And the US could ban bitcoin and probably damage it out of existence. That relates to my “power” of the government point earlier. Bitcoin is vulnerable to that.
But you put alot more thought into it. good job
Even as a fellow crypto hater, IDK what you just said.
I’d just argue that BTC is a fundamental misunderstanding of what money is for, and what makes a currency useful/good.
Because BTC is so supply-constrained, it is almost inherently deflationary. If BTC were the currency of the economy, the economy could not grow faster then the supply of BTC, or the value of BTC would start to increase over time, causing currency deflation.
While we’re all worried about inflation these days, deflation is MUCH worse, since it naturally worsens inequality. People who have a lot of money get richer just by not spending it, and people with debts denominated in BTC see those debts increase in magnitude over time, even if the interest rate is 0%.
I know these days people are nostalgic for the gold standard, but the world decided to come off of the gold standard for very good reasons. Having a constrained money supply also constrains economic growth, and constrains the ability of governments to manage the economy.
I like the saying that if somebody argues the blockchain can solve X problem, they don’t understand X and you can ignore them. That goes all the way down to the root, the original sin is that the person/people who developed BTC did not understand money.
I’m not reading that. If you don’t want bitcoin just.. don’t buy it? Why even bother to write all this crap? Did some bitcoin fan hurt your feelings or someone threw a virtual coin and hurt your head with it? people like you are so funny
Interesting analogy with the push-ups, but it misses the entire point of what makes money money—and why Bitcoin is fundamentally different from both your paper record and fiat.
You’re right that a bare record means nothing by itself. But you’re wrong to claim fiat’s value comes from it being a “debt that must be repaid with goods/services under threat of default.” That hasn’t been true since 1971. Today’s fiat is legal tender by government decree—its value is enforced by taxes, laws, and the state’s monopoly on violence. When that enforcement slips (see Weimar, Zimbabwe, Argentina, Venezuela), the “record” collapses even though it’s still a “debt.” Bitcoin has no counterparty, no inflation target, and no central issuer who can print more. You own the keys or you don’t. That’s a bearer instrument, not a promise from a bank.
You also keep mixing stocks (claims on future cash flows from productive businesses) with money (a medium of exchange and store of value). Bitcoin isn’t being sold as an equity. It’s digital gold—except with perfect scarcity, instant global settlement, and verifiable ownership that no government can seize without your keys. Gold’s value for thousands of years wasn’t from “future benefits” in the stock sense either; it was from being scarce, durable, and universally accepted as money. Bitcoin improves on every single one of those properties.
The proof-of-work isn’t “just a record of past energy spent.” That’s the feature. It’s the ongoing cost that makes the ledger the most secure computing network ever built. Miners are still burning energy right now to protect every transaction from double-spends and reorgs. That security budget is what gives the record present and future value. Calling it a “phantom” is like calling gold a “phantom” because we spent energy digging it up. The atoms (or bits) only have value because a global network of people agrees they do—and Bitcoin’s network has never been successfully attacked in 17 years.
You dismiss decentralization, fixed supply (21 million, enforced by math not kings), censorship resistance, and seizure resistance as “shiny cellophane.” Those aren’t marketing fluff. They’re exactly why nation-states, corporations, ETFs, and millions of individuals keep buying at $70k+. They’re the properties that make it useful as money in the 21st century—especially when governments have already seized gold, frozen bank accounts, and inflated away savings.
The market isn’t buying a useless record of computational “push-ups.” It’s pricing the hardest, most portable, most verifiable form of scarcity ever invented. Network effects are compounding: more users, more security, more adoption. Lightning, stablecoins on Bitcoin layers, institutional custody—these are all real, growing uses delivering actual utility.
You don’t have to own any. But pretending Bitcoin’s value is absurd while ignoring why it has crushed every major asset class for over a decade—and why sovereign wealth funds and countries are still stacking it—is the real sleight-of-hand here. The ledger isn’t the phantom. The belief that governments will forever manage fiat without abuse is.