On the What Bitcoin Did podcast I was listening to Quoth the Raven talk about how it took him a long time to come around on bitcoin. He talked about how there should be an easy answer you can have for a child when asking something like “what exactly am I buying?” But I think it’s hard to answer because of how intangible bitcoin is. Even Peter was fumbling around with trying to come up with a simple answer to that question. From an outsider perspective it makes sense how with $50000 to spend, there should be a simple answer to this question because there’s a whole lot of other things you can buy with $50000. And of course anyone can buy any amount of bitcoin, but unit bias is still very real.
At first my thought for a simple answer is it’s just a currency conversion. It’s like asking “what am I buying when I spend my money on US dollars?” which is clearly a weird question to ask. From there you can unpack the question further, with the acknowledgement that truly answering the question of “what are you buying” is not supposed to have an easy answer. And then you can go into the differences between fiat currencies and bitcoin, what properties of bitcoin make it so valuable, etc.
However this answer only applies if you view bitcoin as a currency. Not a lot of people do, even people who buy bitcoin. Even Michael Saylor does not advocate bitcoin as a currency, instead he frames it as digital property. I think of it as digital property too, but I wonder what’s the ELI5 answer to “what are you buying”, if there is one?