"Bitcoin has no intrinsic value because it's not physical"
We've all heard this from Peter Schiff and people like him countless times
Let me explain why this misses the entire point:
All value is abstraction. Gold doesn't have "value" sitting in its atoms—the atoms just sit there, inert. Gold has value because humans assign value to those properties. That assignment happens in minds, then becomes real through markets when our individual abstractions interact through trade. You think gold is valuable, I think gold is valuable, we trade other things for gold—boom, abstraction becomes market price. Bitcoin works the exact same way.
"But Bitcoin is formless!" No, it's not. Bitcoin has mathematical form, and that form is more concrete than gold's physical form. Why? Because thousands of computers verify Bitcoin's exact properties every 10 minutes. Bitcoin's form is: 21 million supply cap (unchangeable), specific transaction rules (identical everywhere), and cryptographic security (mathematically provable). Every node on Earth agrees on Bitcoin's form. Always. Exactly. Can you say that about gold? No—gold gets diluted, faked, confiscated.
If Bitcoin were truly "formless," you couldn't value it. Markets can only price things with consistent, verifiable form. Gold's form: Atomic #79, chemically inert, scarce. Bitcoin's form: 21M cap, decentralized, cryptographically secured. Both have form. One is physical. One is mathematical. Both are objective.
The real question isn't "does Bitcoin have value?" The question is: which form is more reliable? Physical atoms that can be seized, diluted, or confiscated? Or mathematical properties that can't be changed without global consensus?
You decide. 🧡
We've all heard this from Peter Schiff and people like him countless times
Let me explain why this misses the entire point:
All value is abstraction. Gold doesn't have "value" sitting in its atoms—the atoms just sit there, inert. Gold has value because humans assign value to those properties. That assignment happens in minds, then becomes real through markets when our individual abstractions interact through trade. You think gold is valuable, I think gold is valuable, we trade other things for gold—boom, abstraction becomes market price. Bitcoin works the exact same way.
"But Bitcoin is formless!" No, it's not. Bitcoin has mathematical form, and that form is more concrete than gold's physical form. Why? Because thousands of computers verify Bitcoin's exact properties every 10 minutes. Bitcoin's form is: 21 million supply cap (unchangeable), specific transaction rules (identical everywhere), and cryptographic security (mathematically provable). Every node on Earth agrees on Bitcoin's form. Always. Exactly. Can you say that about gold? No—gold gets diluted, faked, confiscated.
If Bitcoin were truly "formless," you couldn't value it. Markets can only price things with consistent, verifiable form. Gold's form: Atomic #79, chemically inert, scarce. Bitcoin's form: 21M cap, decentralized, cryptographically secured. Both have form. One is physical. One is mathematical. Both are objective.
The real question isn't "does Bitcoin have value?" The question is: which form is more reliable? Physical atoms that can be seized, diluted, or confiscated? Or mathematical properties that can't be changed without global consensus?
You decide. 🧡