Bitcoin is puzzling to me, in that a commodity usually has some value outside of a trading market per se. That is, it is usually consumable in some abstract sense. I'm not sure what you would "do" with Bitcoin other than as some form of currency.
In this regard, ETH always seemed a bit more on track, in the sense that there have been attempts to use the ETH blockchain from the beginning for the purposes of computation, other than "just" as a currency.
I'm not disputing what you're saying about the SEC position regarding Bitcoin, it just seems to highlight for me something a bit off about the SEC position, even if it is favorable in certain ways toward Bitcoin. I come away from all of this feeling a little like neither the SEC nor the crypto community at large are quite being honest or accurate about what's going on with crypto or how it should be regulated.
No intrinsic use. No mass. No degradation. Transports at the speed of light. Perfectly scarce and not debaseable.
All other commodities exist at various vectors outside of this null point. They have various usefulness in and of themselves. They have mass and volume. They degrade at different rates. They take a lot of time and energy to transport. They aren't perfectly scarce and some are absurdly abundant.
Humans have overloaded various commodities throughout history with the memetic concept of "moneyness". Mostly gold and other precious metals because they have properties close to the null point that we find most important (primarily scarcity and close to zero degradation). We hoard these non null commodities because we came to collective consensus to imbue them as the database of our debt to each other, otherwise known as money. However, this had the negative effect of tying up otherwise useful commodities that we might have been able to put to productive work. This money also had the negative effect of being difficult to transport, store securely, and fractionalize.
Then came government backed, faith based currency. It's a near null point commodity and we really like that when choosing something to imbue our collective moneyness concept in. No intrinsic use. Low mass (paper) to no mass (digital). Limited degradation (paper with replacement service) to no degradation (digital). Easy transport (paper with high denominations) to light speed transport (digital). However, it's scarcity is highly questionable. To quote Satoshi, "The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust."
Bitcoin is the null commodity because it solved the final piece of the puzzle that we tried to solve with fiat currencies. Eliminating trust in central authorities and perfect scarcity.
In theory, you could think of bitcoin as electricity that has already been consumed. To replace it, you would have to burn more electricity. The bitcoin concept is to manifest that burned electricity as a tradeable value.
That is the sense in which it's commodity-like. It's the underlying electricity which is consumed.
It's far from clear that this is really valid, but that's the sense of it.
That is a sunk cost without value. Actual commodities can be redeemed for something valuable, for example you can eat an orange. You can't turn the BTC back into electricity or anything else of tangible value.
My inner conspiracy theorist would say that given the crypto market situation and state of ETH and Bitcoin as platforms SEC actions indicate that Bitcoin might have something in its design that US government wants vs ETH.
In this regard, ETH always seemed a bit more on track, in the sense that there have been attempts to use the ETH blockchain from the beginning for the purposes of computation, other than "just" as a currency.
I'm not disputing what you're saying about the SEC position regarding Bitcoin, it just seems to highlight for me something a bit off about the SEC position, even if it is favorable in certain ways toward Bitcoin. I come away from all of this feeling a little like neither the SEC nor the crypto community at large are quite being honest or accurate about what's going on with crypto or how it should be regulated.