This is more a philosophical wander than anything else, but a lot of these Bitcoin influencers seem to have never taken a moment to ask what money really is.
Money exists as an idea. A passing thought. It doesn’t have protons, nor neutrons, nor electrons, save for in the slips of paper that can represent it in physical form from time to time, or in the silicon wafers.
The operating system for all money, given that it only ever exists as a pure idea, is the human brain. Penguins don’t care about money because the operating system for money doesn’t extend to the penguin brain. Penguins do care about the weather, or about fish, because these things, unlike money, exist outside of the context of the human brain; they are real things with real atoms and that have real impact for many creatures, ourselves included.
Bitcoin, USD, Solana, the Yen: these are all apps that run exclusively on HumanBrainOS, and in that respect they are all the same. Their value is determined not by what they are in some objective “out there in the world” sense. It is determined exclusively by HumanBrainOS, by how the OS processes (or does not process) the app code. That is it.
In the end all money is marketing. The rather random fact that Bitcoin supply is capped at 21 million—this is only a valuable fact insofar as it can effectively fuel lobbying campaigns that influence the development of HumanBrainOS. If a new version of HumanBrainOS comes out, and that version stops processing this particular fact/code, then this fact carries no value at all.
HumanBrainOS updates can force any app to crash, be it the Bitcoin app or the USD app or any other app.
If enough human brains with the means to affect the value of a given money make certain decisions then the value, well, changes (meaning these brains are in possession of, and are willing to part with, enough of something else already considered valuable in order to obtain this money, or they are willing to discard this money for something of lower value than was considered fair value for the same amount of money at an earlier time).
Basically money is all marketing in the end. It has to be because nothing about money exists at all, in any form, outside of the context of human-to-human persuasion.
This is something I try to keep in mind when I see people talking about this money or that money as if it has some objective value-defining property that exists outside of this very banal context. It never has and never will.