The most hilarious, and kind of bizarre, thing nowadays is how firmly masses of people believe there is money in the Bitcoin system: that they are mining and buying coins, holding assets, exchanging currency, or owning something, even though it is easy to see that nothing is there.
The confusion originates in the Bitcoin white paper. In it, Satoshi Nakamoto used terms such as electronic cash, coins, ownership, transactions, and double-spending. This created the illusion that the protocol and software he designed track something, that there is a thing to own, transfer, and spend. Yet all that his creation does is maintain a decentralized list showing which numbers are assigned to which identities (cryptographic keys). From that point on, that list was treated as a ledger, as if the assigned numbers were balances expressing the amount of an existing thing, even though no such thing exists.
Generally, if one owns something, we must be able to identify it. There must be something physical, digital, or legally bound to begin with. All existing things have some identifiable and measurable form. This is straightforward.
Things like gold, oil, land, or buildings have easily identifiable physical forms. Things like Excel spreadsheets, MP3 files, video files, or software programs have easily identifiable digital forms.
Anyone who has ever taken even a quick look at the Bitcoin system has seen that nothing like that exists in it. An identity assigned the number 50 does not possess 50 units of anything physical. Nothing tangible is stored, reserved, or delivered in proportion to that number. It also possesses nothing digital. There are no 50 discrete files, data objects, or software artifacts to store or transfer.
The remaining possibility is something legally bound, as in financial systems, because Bitcoin is constantly compared to such systems. In financial systems, people own instruments that track someone else's liability. A liability means that an individual or organization is legally bound to act, resulting in the instrument holder receiving something.
That receiving may occur either directly or indirectly. Shares track a company's liability to its shareholders. When companies decide to distribute profits, perform buybacks, or liquidate the business, they are legally bound to make direct payments to shareholders. PayPal balances and casino chips track explicit obligations to redeem a stated amount of money. In these cases, the holder of the instrument can directly demand something.
In other cases, the receiving occurs indirectly. Fiat money is created through bank lending, which means borrowers are legally bound to repay banks. The only way to meet that obligation is to produce goods, perform services, or offer labor to those who hold fiat money, and, if the borrower is a government, to allow tax payments in that money. Money holders do not have direct claims on individual borrowers, but they ultimately receive something from them because this repayment liability exists within the banking system. The instrument delivers real-world value (goods/services/labor/tax settlements) precisely because it tracks borrowers' liabilities.
In the Bitcoin system, no such instrument exists. The assignment of numbers to identities does not express the amount of anyone's liability. No one in the system is legally bound to act because Nakamoto's code links numbers to cryptographic keys. Consequently, nothing can be delivered, either directly or indirectly, to those who control these keys. The system records the numbers, prevents duplication, and allows reassignment. That is all.
So nothing physical, digital, or financial (legally bound) exists in the Bitcoin system to be owned, transferred, or spent. There is no identifiable entity we could call money or an asset, examine to determine its value, or express its amount in numbers. That decentralized list is therefore not a ledger, and the assigned numbers are not balances.
Nakamoto's creation is a large-scale and cryptographic version of writing your name on a slip of paper, scrawling "50" next to it, and proclaiming that you own 50 units of an asset, all while being unable to show anything that exists beyond that inscription. If you decide to limit the maximum number you will write, this is not scarcity but an arbitrary rule applied to nothing.
What transforms this nothing into something people claim to buy, mine, and invest in is language and collective storytelling. When discussing Bitcoin, everyone speaks of coins, money, or assets, which creates the illusion that these things exist in the system. But nothing exists at all. Bitcoin is not a failed or overvalued currency, but a non-existent one.
The emperor is not naked; he does not exist.