> I'm talking about a bank account not holding physical bills
Trusting the regulated bank isn't that far from trusting the monetary authority that gives paper bills value. Or, for that matter, for the 99% of people who have not verified Bitcoin's math and have not inspected the code running on the servers they buy Bitcoin through, trusting the techies who pitch the product.
That's..a different discussion. My point is that IN bank and IN wallet are both technically incorrect, but for basically all purposes correct.
But yes, you are right that the vast majority of users of [piece of software] have not verified [piece of software] and are relying on other humans to basically tell them if they should or shouldn't run it.
You have a point in that neither bank accounts nor bitcoin wallets are wallets in any shape or form, the difference is bank accounts are not advertised as wallets, but bitcoin wallets are. Also interesting that the bitcoin imagery is all about gold coins, when in fact there are no coins at all, virtual or otherwise. Bitcoin is merely an abstract unit of count. The very name 'bitcoin' is misleading. Everything about cryptocurrencies seems fraudulent in one way or another.
You really think people equate crypto wallets with physical wallets, more than they do bank accounts? Not sure I agree. I think it would be much better if they did equate it with a wallet. An account can be recovered if lost, a wallet cannot. Wallet encourages better behavior security wise IMO.
I think you're grasping at straws with the coins thing..you really think there's an attempt to confuse people into thinking that it's..physical coins?
From my experience, most people are left in disbelief when you tell them that the bitcoins they own are not in their wallet. It reflects a deep lack of understanding of how bitcoin works. I don't think misunderstanding how a financial product works is a good thing. Whereas, again, from my experience, bank accounts are well understood. People are fully aware that their funds are not being kept in a box in the bank's vault, and no one tries to convince them of the contrary either.
Okay, then that vacuous point is correct as well. A bank account is just a 9-ish digit number. So in that regard it's similar to a bitcoin wallet. What the person who started this convo was saying is that his friend thought the bitcoin wallet contained the bitcoins, in the exact same way that a regular wallet contains regular paper currency. That the bitcoin wallet would grow in file size based on the amount of bitcoin inside it. All pedantic misinterpretations aside, I'm pretty confident that's what he was trying to convey.
