[zeestephen]

OK - I admit I am not fluent in all the precise Bitcoin terms.

Two points...

My impression is that 90% of the impassioned Bitcoin advocates on these Free Republic threads do not own Bitcoins.

They own financial instruments - created by people and companies that do own Bitcoins.

If you owned 10 real mined Bitcoins and decided to sell them, tell me exactly how you would do that.

Thanks.

[palmer]

If you owned 10 real mined Bitcoins and decided to sell them, tell me exactly how you would do that.

Had about 12 at my peak. Quite a while ago now. Mostly they were physical private keys (printed but hidden under a tamperproof seal) Gave away a bunch. Bought stuff including digital services with others. The ones I sold for cash were transacted to accounts at Bitstamp and Coinbase. As soon as those were transacted I no longer owned anything. Those companies had some amount of bitcoin or cash they were holding or pretending to hold in my name. But that's against the entire philosophy of bitcoin as it's own currency. That use is practically dead.

Here are my steps for spending the bitcoin:

1. scratch off the tamper proof seal
2. scan the private key into my phone using an app that allows import
3. find something I want to buy online (e.g. a new web3 domain)
4. point my phone app at the QR code provided by the vendor
5. I give permission for the app to use the private key
6. my phone app signs a transaction with that private key
7. the app sends the transaction to the bitcoin network to be validated and consummated

One thing that should be fairly clear is that with the above steps the only thing that can be stolen is that private key in the app on my phone (hard to hack and even harder to transact without my explicit permission in step 5). Or the same private key printed on the paper (hidden camera in my house) Or that piece of paper from my safe. That's very difficult. That means nobody can steal my bitcoin. But as you point out the people that own financial instruments based on bitcoin own nothing. They have shares or an account or something.

Not much different from silver or gold. I can have a stack of silver in my safe. Or I can have shares in a precious metals ETF. In the former case I actually own something. In the latter case there's some gold in a vault somewhere probably, hopefully, and their server has my account in its database saying that I hopefully maybe probably own some small amount of that gold. But the fine print in the contract probably says I own nothing but they will do their best to send me my money if I ask them to.