It does though. It stores it using the mechanism you've just described. Energy is an etherial thing, taking many forms, changing forms, being present yet unseen in a lot of circumstances.
You can also think of money as points earned in a video game.
Discussion
Money is leverage you can use to get someone to do something for you **cleanly & fairly**, now or later. It "stores" nothing, and since the future is always randomly uncertain, we really can't quantify its value beyond this moment, but we use approximations (estimates, projections) to get as close as possible.
Storing energy literally is one thing, but holding bitcoin isn't that.
Even the hardest, scarcest money is still virtual by its very nature. Producing it, or anything else, is what's real.
Energy isn't an ethereal thing. It is something you can measure very precisely.
Just 'cause something is etherial doesn't mean you cant measure it. Money is etherial, yet its value gets measured all the time.
What do you mean by ethereal? Dictionary definition is other worldly. Energy isn't other worldly. It's a precise physical thing, that is well understood and clearly defined. Which is why it can be measured.
If I send you a gallon of milk and we both sign a receipt that it was delivered, you drink it, then 2 years later I use the receipt to prove that you can give me back a gallon of milk and that we are even - that isn’t storing the milk. It’s keeping a record of it.
Money is a record of exchanged energy that is the closest to immutable as possible. I know a lot of people like the analogy, but it’s not accurate. Energy is a real thing, like milk, and money keeps a secure record of its production and consumption, it doesn’t store energy itself.
It is, tho. You've basically stored a gallllon of milk withme for two years.
You go to work. You spend energy working. They give you money. You are then able to extract energy out of that money in form of callories (food), electricity (paying electric bill), etc. You can do it at a later date (the energy you have stored in money sits there until you decide to use it. Some of that energy can leak out in form of inflation (just like batteries are not 100% efficient at storing energy).
The capacity of the battery that is money is not determined by an individual, butthesociety at large. This is why currency can increase and decrease in value. If there is one dollar in existence for the entire country, 100% od the energy present in the country can be storer in that one dollar. If someone prints another dollar, now each dollar is worth 50% of thecountry's GDP,etc. It's more complicated than this, but you getthe gist.
Energy is weird and can be stored in weird ways. If you carry a bolulder up a hill and leave it there, the energy you've spent carrying the boulder up is stored in that boulder. It'scalled potential energy. The boulder can discharge that energy by falling. That energy can be used, forexample to damage a house underneath the hill.
That is inaccurate to the definition of the word “store.”
I have stored a **record** of it, which you can redeem for me later if you trust it to do the same, but the actual milk has not been stored. The original gallon was consumed.
The milk is objectively not being stored. Money just lets me get milk again (or equivalent in orange juice, or a hard drive) if more is produced in the future.
And a critical reason we use money in the first place is specifically BECAUSE all other goods deteriorate or rot.
There’s a very simple test to understand this:
1. Everyone produces a ton of stuff and trades it for money
2. They hold the money for 10 years
3. All of society is destroyed production stops due to economic crisis or natural disaster
4. Everyone still has their money
Can you get the energy out of the money now?
Obviously you can’t, because none is being produced and the money didn’t actually store it. It is a record that allows you to trade for new energy produced far into the future because someone else values the money as a trustworthy record keeping system.
Also I like your potential energy analogy, but it doesn’t apply here. Potential energy is *actually* energy. It’s the measure of a force being exerted that *could* be realized. In other words, without gravity there is no potential energy. So we are just measuring gravity, which is present and constant. There is no force being “exerted on money” that would allow it to suddenly turn into energy in the same way. Very different mechanisms.
My test in the other post is the best way to make this obvious.
Can we say :
Money is an abstraction that facilitates the storage and transfer of value.
Yeah of course. Thats basically what a tradable record keeping system is.
Your milk money example has a small issue I can't resolve. If trading milk for money and in two years want to trade back(assuming no inflation). Your analogy is only relevant if hold both sides to the same scrutiny. you would only be able to get the exact same molecules of milk if you give back the exact same molecules(serial number, BTC number) of money.
You're not really storing milk but it's energy. in 2 years my cow could stil not produce milk, so I could repay you in something else, like loaves of bread.
And yeah, if society is destroyed, your energy store is drained. Because it's a complicated system and what gives this battery its capacity is not just GDP but also the "metaphysical" belief and social contract that society places on it. That doesn't mean the energy is not stored, it means the battery is not very reliable.
I don't know if you're familiar w/ occult terminology, but it's an egregore: a metaphysical construct created by public. It has power and we charge it with energy. It stores the energy and can give it back. It is fallable and can fail miserably.
Another example: I can spend lots of energy working for a boss and he could underpay me. The amount of money he does pay me does have energy that I can either store in money or conver to callaries, etc. The energy stored in money he doesn't pay me doesn't just disappear. He still has that money that I made for him by working for him. He can use that energy on himself. Even if he burns that cash, that energy doesn't get destroyed but evenly sprad amonst the other dollars that are left in circulation (the opposite of inflation, the supply of cash decreases, thus increasing the price of the currency).
I guess we have to agree to disagree because this still has nothing to do with storing energy.
Back to my test, if that was a battery and not money, I’d still have all the electricity I need… because it ACTUALLY stores energy. Money stores *value* in the network that trust it for exchange. Which means you can *trade it* for energy that is available, but that, explicitly, is NOT storing energy.
Sure, it sounds great when Saylor says it and it’s an interesting and useful mental image, but it does not store energy and this is very easily and objectively provable.
Go ahead and take a bitcoin balance, and without anybody else or any trade or anything, get energy out of it… you can’t, because it doesn’t *store* energy. It simply allows you to trade for it.