Gold and silver coins are hard to track tokens which effectively represent a balance sheet except in a physical form rather than written words. In theory nothing prevents you from cutting out parts of a balance sheet and glueing them on another balance sheet to emulate physical tokens.

With Bitcoin it is quite obvious. The strange part is that these assets have no corresponding liabilities, nobody has to accept them. The best you can do is speculate that people will accept them in the future.

> Explain to me how bitcoin is literally debt?

Bitcoin is a literally a distributed ledger, so it's very much debt.

Gold and silver aren't strictly debt because they also happen to be commodities that were used for their aesthetic properties. However, it's use as money is a system of keeping track of credits and debts.

Ledgers can hold assets, not just debts. And not all ledgers have to sum to zero. So unless you can explain something more specific about bitcoin as a ledger, the "ledger" argument fails.

And, can you explain, if a bitcoin is debt, to whom is the debt owed?

I think he probably should have said "all fiat currency".

Even that is not true. One could argue that it's true in a system like the US, where the Federal Reserve is separate from the Treasury. I'm not sure it's true in a fiat currency situation where the Treasury can print money for free and then spend it. (Of course, that's the path to ruin through government fiscal irresponsibility destroying the currency...)