>By that logic they should ban gift cards and in-game currency too.
...those aren't money.
...those aren't money.
Last winter whoever held the information of 1BTC held the equivalent to 20,000 real tangible USD’s that they could take to the bank, exchange for food, etc. Today that same kind of information isn’t as valuable in the marketplace, but it’s still as “real” as anything once we get past the misconception that all things real must exist in one physical form.
TLDR; Is it real? Absolutely. Is it valuable? Right now it is.
If you lock a nugget of gold away for 5000 years in an unbreachable time capsule, it will still be a pliable and lustrous metal when you dig up, if you do the same thing with a wallet private key, you can't even be sure if the token's network exists much less all the infrastructure that it depends on to even exist.
If you're able to ascertain a wallet private key 5,000 years from now, it'll still be as 'real' as it is at this moment. Just maybe not as useful/functional or valuable.
Well... unless in 5,000 years there is a crypto museum out there willing to pay significant sums for anyone who can produce a valid private key for an address that once had a transaction on the blockchain.