Does Bitcoin provide other features a side from transfers?

Question

Does Bitcoin provide other features a side from transfers ?

Answer 1

Bitcoin is fundamentally a system of digital cash that doesn't need trusted third parties. As such its core purpose is the transfer of money from one person to another (without any need for a trusted intermediary).

There are both simple and complex forms of transaction such as multisignature transactions but these are just variations of transfers of money.

Obviously there are a lot of ancilliary functions that are needed to support this, the creation of private-keys, network protocols that allow nodes to replicate the transaction journal ("blockchain") and so on. But this is just infrastructure. Of little interest in itself. It is true that people have been inspired to do other things that are based on the idea of a replicated immutable record created and maintained in a decentralised way in a peer to peer network. But these are not Bitcoin. Bitcoin's blockchain is not intended to be used for these other purposes and it is generally detrimental to Bitcoin to do so.

Of course there can be no prohibition on third parties offering additional features that may be Bitcoin related in some way. Examples might include speculative trading against other currencies, distributed exchanges, interest bearing investment etc. But these features don't seem to me to be fundamentally provided by Bitcoin itself.

To me its a bit like asking what features are offered by a $5 bill (banknote). Could we say it offers the feature of lighting your cigar, keeping a diary, creating origami figures? Those features are not what it is intended for.

Other than transfer what features does the dollar as a currency offer? That takes you into standard discussion of the meaning of a currency as a medium of exchange, as a store of value and so on. These also apply to currencies like Bitcoin but I suspect these sorts of features may not be what you are asking about.