Bitcoin Suisse and Worldline ink partnership for wider crypto use

I fund it irresponsible when journalists show pictures of a bitcoin or ethereum represented as a physical coin. My father-in-law (a medical doctor) was surprised when I told him they were not physical coins as a result of all these misleading graphics. His follow-up question was “what are they made of then?” There is going to be a big backlash from all this stuff being mis-sold into retail channels and journalists have played their part.

I concur with Barrie's view, but the metaphor is fundamentally incorrect as well.

There is no such thing as a bitcoin or an ethereum etc, there is no digital item you can find or identify, for example a unique character string to represent individual bitcoins or ethereum.

Instead, on these blockchains, there are transactions associated (digitally signed) with private keys, and each private key has a net balance, a number, of the buy and sell transactions for that private key, which is typically calculated by a wallet but not stored as a balance (however, there are blockchains such as the XRP ledger which do use the concept of an account and maintain a balance for each private key on a ledger account, which has processing advantages, but there is still no concept of a uniquely identifiable XRP). 

This balance is just a number, which is given a unit name such as bitcoin, depending on the blockchain. For example, there are 18,038,238 bitcoins as of 9 Nov 2019, which means the sum of the balance on all the private keys used on the bitcoin blockchain sums to 18,038,238. It is incorrect to believe there are 18,038,238 uniquely identifiable bitcoins.

Many journalists fail to understand this concept, especially when talking about tokenisation. Digital assets such as bitcoin and ethereum are often described as tokens, but the token is the name of the units of the balances associated with each private key, there are no uniquely identifiable BTC or ETH tokens.