Bitcoin is not a store of value
&gt; Any token system can be thought of as a pot of money. Every cryptocurrency is its own pot of money. When people sell, they are taking money out of the pot. When people buy, they are putting money into the pot.<p>I&#x27;m not sure where the author gets this from, but it doesn&#x27;t make sense.<p>Buying and selling bitcoin does not change the size of the pot of bitcoin. Look on the block chain and you&#x27;ll find no mention of USD, alpaca socks, or Lambos purchased. What you&#x27;ll find are state transitions with value being unlocked and simultaneously re-locked.<p>The one exception is a block reward, which requires no unlock (input).<p>The block reward can be viewed from one of two perspectives:<p>1. value being created<p>2. value being unlocked<p>Either way, the block reward comes into existence on a fixed schedule known to all participants.<p>The author tries to once again bring in the US dollar as follows:<p>&gt; In this more accurate representation, we have miners pulling money out of the pot in two ways: transaction fees, and the selling of their Bitcoin mining rewards. The latter is harmful to BTC’s value in two ways. It dilutes the circulating supply of BTC which decreases its value, and it pulls money from the pot to cover energy costs. A majority portion of the money miners are pulling from the system is being burned forever in the form of energy costs, meaning it has no way of ever re-entering the system.<p>Again, bitcoin transactions merely unlock and re-lock value as an atomic operation. What the author characterizes as &quot;value&quot; is an off-chain phenomenon.<p>That last part about &quot;being burned forever&quot; is debatable. The residual value of the energy expenditure is proof-of-work that the author conveniently ignores. That proof-of-work is what stands between the Bitcoin network and an attack that rewrites history. So to characterize mining as &quot;burning forever&quot; value misleads the reader into thinking nothing of value remains. This is demonstrably false.