bitcoin is a 256-bit number. Today, governments would like to regulate the usage of approximately 33,437,921 of these magic numbers. I'm guessing most of community can at least find humor in this.
And they don't care about the numbers in general, unlike certain other cases where people have tried to restrict numbers entirely.
They just regulate transfers of control of value. You can communicate transfers of control of value with anything. Rocks, flags, numbers, dance. Doesn't mean governments want to regulate "magic rocks".
If I posted a number which happened to have a value of $14,001 USD in this post, I would be breaking the law. If I sold t-shirts with bitcoin private keys printed on them, I would be considered an unlicensed money transmitter by FinCEN.
1. Ownership of the deposit box is not define by pin holders
2. Deposit boxes are tangible
3. Deposit boxes and contents have intrinsic value
3. Forgetting a pin doesn't effectively destroy the box and contents
4. The security of a deposit box is not defined by only math
I'm not trying to be pedantic, I'm just saying it is more complicated than that.
Some people might not know about Rai stones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones
> While the monetary system of Yap appears to use these giant stones as tokens, in fact it relies on an oral history of ownership. Being too large to move, buying an item with these stones is as easy as saying it no longer belongs to you. As long as the transaction is recorded in the oral history, it will now be owned by the person you passed it on to—no physical movement of the stone is required.
On a philosophical take, I'd say that informal "favor currencies" that people in small places use are an earlier form of money as speech, though admittedly, it's a less precise form of money.