Read original research: https://diginomics.com/2018/11/10/blockspace-commodity-bitcoin/When an individual makes a transaction on the bitcoin network, no actual currency is moved. That is – no file has moved, no commodity or asset has moved, no private or public key has moved. Rather, the only thing which changes is the percentage of the blockchain ledger which User A & B claim control over.
When a transaction occurs in the realm of bitcoin, the image of the blockchain is altered. Nothing ever changes but the
composition of this blockchain record. The blockchain is a historical record of its ownership. It is a downloadable file (.dat) which began at zero and is now ~ 189 gigabytes (GB) in size.
There is no separation to be made between the blockchain and bitcoin. They are
one in the same. Without the blockchain, you have no bitcoin ecosystem. Without an accompanying cryptocurrency, you have no measuring tool to determine the ownership of the blockchain. Money is now an image, rather than something which can be separated from the
system itself. This image of money is being constructed by machines acting as miners across the globe. The miners are the painters of the blockchain image.
On the bitcoin network, money is an image continuously being generated (coinbase), re-attributed, and verified by way of cryptographic authorization – the application of
numerical law.
The commodity of bitcoin is blockspace – that is, space within the blockchain where data can be timestampped and verified into existence through the decentralized network of computers who are contributing their labour (hashing proof-of-work) in order to propagate the next iteration of the blockchain record.
Each hash performed by a bitcoin miner produces a random number between 0 and the maximum value of a 256-bit number. The SHA-256 hash of a block's header must be lower than or equal to the current target to be accepted by the network. If not, miners increment the nonce (completely changing the hash) and try again. This is the contributed labour that all miners contribute to the ledger of bitcoin.
The process of verifying information into the blockchain is the work performed. Each unit of bitcoin gains its value from the amount of work (hashpower) that went into solving the latest block.
Blockspace is the commodity!