> all they have are a load of strings of characters
Most things valuable nowadays are strings of characters. It's not the byte sequence that's valuable, it's what it represents. Bitcoin is, conceptually speaking, an asset that is orders of magnitude better than most existing financial instruments and commodities. The fact that it's implemented using bits instead of atoms is completely irrelevant.
I really don't understand this urge of breaking down anything digital into its fundamental units to try and diminish its value. It's the equivalent of evaluating anything in the physical world as "just a bunch of atoms".
Most things valuable nowadays are strings of characters. It's not the byte sequence that's valuable, it's what it represents. Bitcoin is, conceptually speaking, an asset that is orders of magnitude better than most existing financial instruments and commodities. The fact that it's implemented using bits instead of atoms is completely irrelevant.
I really don't understand this urge of breaking down anything digital into its fundamental units to try and diminish its value. It's the equivalent of evaluating anything in the physical world as "just a bunch of atoms".