Bitcoin: A Network for Imitating Ownership Taken Seriously

Over the past decade or so, one of the strangest phenomena in history has taken place. Masses of people, enormous financial institutions, and even entire countries absolutely and unconditionally believe in one thing: that inside the Bitcoin network they own... something. Even top economists and the fiercest critics play the same game. They all talk about Bitcoin as if it were a currency or some kind of asset.

But if we set aside those complicated economic terms for just a second and look at the network itself, a rather bitter truth awaits us. There is absolutely nothing there that can be owned.

Bitcoin is actually a perfect, ingenious imitation of ownership. It displays numbers to users, and they believe that something exists in their possession proportional to those numbers.

Think about the language people use every day. You constantly hear: "I have bitcoins," "I sent bitcoin," "I lost my coins." That is the language of classical ownership, isn't it? And the human brain falls into the trap. A person to whom the network displays "10 BTC" feels subjectively more powerful and richer than someone with a record "0.001 BTC." That feels natural to them. It is exactly the same psychological and social pattern normally associated with physical things. These people subconsciously think that the difference is the same as fifty grams of gold versus one gram. A bigger number, more mass, more value.

But there is one huge problem: with Bitcoin, the object of ownership is completely missing.

Let's simplify for a moment. When we say in the real world, whether legally or economically, that something is owned, it must always, without exception, fall into one of two categories. It is either a thing or a claim. There is no third option.

The first category consists of things. These are physical objects: a house, a car, a painting on the wall, or some collectible item that can be touched and displayed. Of course, things today can also be digital, such as software you use, a video you watch, or a music file you listen to. All of these are concrete, functional items.

The second category consists of claims. When someone has cash or money in a bank account, they hold a claim against the bank's debtors. Banks create that money through credit, which means that real debtors exist somewhere who must provide their labor, goods, or services to the holders of the money in order to repay that credit. If they fail, banks realize the claim by seizing and selling their property. It is similar with e-money, gift cards, or casino chips; they are claims against the issuer who is obliged to redeem them. Stocks, bonds, patents, and copyrights? All of these are legal claims on future cash flows or exclusive rights to an idea.

And now the question arises: where does Bitcoin fit in?

In Bitcoin there is neither a thing nor a claim. Consider this: users spend enormous amounts of electricity to maintain the computer network, and the protocol assigns them a number. Or they pay someone a large sum of real money to have that number transferred to them. What have they actually received?

They have not received any physical object. They have no unit of mass, no volume. They have not even received a digital thing like functional software that they can run and use.

And most importantly, they have no claim. There is no issuer obliged to buy back their number. There is no company standing behind it that pays them anything. There is no living debtor who has to get up in the morning, go to work, and labor for them to settle the debt owed to the creditor. In this network, there is not even a "token," because a token is a claim against the entity that issued it.

Here we are dealing with numbers that have absolutely no connection to reality. Behind them there is nothing that could be called a currency or an asset. There is nothing that could even be evaluated to determine its value.

And now we come to the most fascinating part. For years these people have been competing, outbidding one another, racing, and throwing billions of dollars... at absolutely nothing. By pushing the price of that "nothing" from zero to astronomical heights, they have created the largest and most expensive collective delusion in human history.

Yet even more fascinating is the accompanying collective psychological defense mechanism. How do these users protect themselves from the realization that their hands are actually completely empty?

They have woven an incredible, endless loop of romanticized stories. All those loud narratives about "decentralization," "digital gold," and "freedom" do not serve only as a marketing tool. They are also a sophisticated psychological shield. It is a shield within which imagination takes over the role of regulator of reality. The greater the gap between their belief and reality, the louder the shared ideology must become. It must become more aggressive, it must take on elements of the sacred. Because admitting to themselves and others that there is nothing behind that digital number... would mean facing the unbearable anxiety of total loss and their own gullibility.

That is why this economic nihilism is collectively disguised as a "financial revolution." That is why this defense mechanism eventually grows into a rigid, intolerant religion. In it, every doubt is automatically punished and ridiculed, while pure, one-hundred-percent illusion is celebrated as the supreme economic truth of the modern age.