That is what I am saying. The movement of capital in the stock market has no meaningful form of utility. You move it because you want to buy paper at a lower price and sell it at a higher price. It's similar to the utility generated by a casino. This is very different from the way people use money. The movement of cash is usually done in the name of purchasing something that has actual physical utility. The movement of stocks especially HFT has no utility. I don't buy tesla stocks because I can actually do anything with it. I buy tesla stocks for the sole purpose of gambling.. to sell a share to someone else who wants to make the same gambling play. The entire market consists of these entities with essentially the same strategy. No production of goods is involved...

>You can borrow against it (it's called "margin"). People do it all the time.

You can borrow against cash as well. Though usually when you borrow against cash you're buying a house to live in rather than borrowing more useless paper stocks to sell at higher prices. Basically you are borrowing money to use at a casino when you use margins. Imagine an entire economy built around casinos. Would that economy be productive? No. The exchange of money in casinos intrinsically does not involve the creation or exchange of goods. Where would all of our GDP go if an economy consisted of only casinos? It would go to shit. Same if the economy consisted of only stock markets. But if the economy consisted of only farms...? well, food has utility.

The infrastructure surrounding casinos is similar to the server farms mining bitcoin and polluting the air. It's a questionable use of capital.

>A simpler answer is if the stock market had no utility nobody would trade stocks. But they do, millions do. Are they all fools, or have you made a mistake?

Do not underestimate the power of human stupidity. Let's say I have an scheme for making money. I'm going to print out a bunch of useless paper and start selling that paper for 100x what its worth. Then I have another idea... as little as it is, paper actually has some value so I can optimize this scheme by making a digital platform for selling these pieces of paper as pieces of encrypted information. I call the first piece the genesis block.... aka bitcoin.

Make no mistake, the utility of a bitcoin is equivalent to the utility of a counterfeit dollar and their origins are identical: both were created out of thin air. You have to be pretty dumb to buy a piece of paper at 100x the price let alone an abstract digital representation of that paper (bitcoin). Yet people do buy bitcoin and they do make money off of it. It's collective stupidity that allows an individual to profit... from a broader perspective, however, no actual utility is generated off of the mining of bitcoin just like how no utility is generated over the exchange of stocks.