Chess is to humans as Bitcoin is to computers (Chess : Humans :: Bitcoin : Computers). Except humans stick up for the wastefulness of both, and computers stay silent on the matter.
I don’t know, their fans complain quite loudly.
That's what quickly got me out of chess, when it was me playing with my brother as a kid it was about thinking really hard and trying to explore as many options as I could - it was really about who can think faster and outsmarting eachother since we only knew the rules.
When I decided to look into chess I found out it was about learning openings, recognising patterns, traps, etc. I didn't feel any smarter learning those, I just learned more about chess. You can draw up silly strategic methapores with any activity, but chess does seem to have that Sun Tzu status.
You do need to understand phases of the game, set up strategy, estimate your position, know when to attack or to defend, and have confidence in your technique.
Mind you, that is only for the plain master title (FIDE or even a national master). Grandmasters are a whole new level in comparison, aliens.
Chess has this poetic image of playing around with kings, queens and pawns that lets artist paint grandiose metaphors about real world, but at the end of the day spending a bunch of time on chess is going to make you good at chess, doubt it will do much better than any other similar hobby for transferable skills.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludic_fallacy
“… the focus on those pure, well-defined, and easily discernible objects like triangles, or more social notions like friendship or love, at the cost of ignoring those objects of seemingly messier and less tractable structures.”
but studying hard topics can teach you thinking tactics for analyzing problems and looking for thr big picture.
I mean... I am charitably trying to find interpretation/context in which this is meaningfully true, and failing. In which way is bitcoin more "computer money" than any other money these days?
I purchase things, pay my bills, obtain payment, invest, and do all my transactions at least 95% digitally, with "computer money".
Uncharitably, I could call Bitcoin "that, but less practical / more wasteful". Charitably, I could say "There are specific goals/circumstances where Bitcoin has benefits".
But I feel it's decades late to be "first iteration of computer money", unless there's some squinting and extremely specific ad-hoc defining that I haven't imagined. Even the "Money" part (as practical transactional currency) is these days increasingly less relevant,by proponents and pundits alike, as opposed to "investment vehicle" or "storage of value".
(as for chess, I don't know; I gave up when I realized how much memorization, as opposed to developing of understanding, was involved to get much better; it may indeed enable self-knowledge and mold character at some level beyond the ones I've achieved. Therefore, I cannot contribute to discussion on whether Chess is practical/efficient/meaningful way to grow those characteristics - i.e. hammering rocks for 5,000hrs probably grows character at some level but may not be sufficiently practical/efficient to matter. I respect it like a do Golf - it takes immense skill, dedication, and investment to develop it to a high level, and world-class players are incredibly good at it; but it's not a skill I desire to grow myself anymore).
Emphasis is on how minting, the creation of new money, is strictly enforced by the protocol (software), and decentralized. Further, it is hard-capped.
As such, it's money that is born digitally, natively. This extends to ownership, which is just a bunch of private keys.
But let's agree to disagree there. Even then, money has multiple roles: unit of account, store of value.
Currently, Bitcoin plays the role of storing value. Like a savings account, or "digital gold". Not for payments. It might play a payment role in the future on layer 2, or it might not. Too soon to tell.
The first iteration of computer money is called 'regular money'. Nobody uses cash anymore, we all use computer money.