A commodity is a product. Products are either consumed or used as raw materials. A digital commodity is not a product. It can't be consumed or used, because it's entirely imaginary.
I think a better term is "abstract unit of account".
You consume a BTC by using/trading it. You consume gold or maple syrup by using/trading it. Just because the uses are a little different doesn't mean it's incompatible with the definition of commodity. If I started using gold in a nonsensical way you wouldn't start saying "oh now it's a security", would you?
So you consume bitcoin the same way a central bank consumes gold: by sitting on it, selling it when you need to, or buying more in times of expected turmoil.
Bitcoin is far younger than gold (12 years vs thousands), so its obviously more volatile.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-in...
Consume:
- eat, drink, or ingest (food or drink).
- buy (goods or services).
- use up (a resource).
- (especially of a fire) completely destroy.
- (of a feeling) absorb all of the attention and energy of (someone).
And again, that is by design of both the instruments themselves and the massive PR campaigns/grifts around them.
The whole trick is attempting to position these things as “the half of the definition of commodity that means this has intrinsic value but not the other half of the definition which says it’s a raw input,” or “the half of the definition of a security that means You Can Make Money, but not the other half that says I can be regulated as someone selling a You Can Make Money instrument.”
The point is that you cannot consume crypto, it's a problem which is understood inside the community, that's why the push for NFTs which started as legitimate art to enjoy on huge 8K screens or VR headsets but quickly ended up becoming Twitter avatars built for the purpose of trading and offloading to a bigger fool.
Hence the SEC is right to clampdown on crypto for violations of securities law, in order to prevent bubbles that emerge when the only use for something is trading it for something else. We already have that, people who want to participate in that game know where to go, the stock market.
> > for a direct analog to your example, by showing off your wallet balance
That's the most circular thought I've ever heard.