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Comment by kordless | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin's intrinsic value is related to its ability to store a moderate amount of "debt" related data in an immutable way. As long as this "feature" continues to work well in our current economic environment, people/entities will continue using it. Saying it's going to the moon, or pop, is simply a result of a biased argument against the technology and neglects the real value in being able to say this transaction is related to these events created by human causality.

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On lower level, Bitcoin's intrinsic value is the right/ability to write a new row into an immutable append-only decentralised censorship-proof spreadsheet table. It is valuable not only in economic context to create a border-less cash-like virtual commodity. It could be used for proof of publication or proof of existence and in many other ways.

Without causality, storing a number in a row in an immutable table isn't going to happen. Bitcoin's value is certainly derived from its ability to keep things immutable, but keep in mind there is another force at play here as well: human based causality.

Bitcoin's intrinsic value is related to its ability to store a moderate amount of "debt" related data in an immutable way.

What is this supposed to mean? It sounds a bit like carving IOUs in stone but that is probably not what you were hinting at.

> carving IOUs in stone

I would consider Rai Stones as a good analagy, given they also stored suffering in a trustworthy way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones.

When I say "suffering" I'm referring to the amount of causality associated with a given amount of value stored, not the human emotion attached to it.

IOUs that can't be repudiated, payments that can be cryptographically proven, payments that can have conditional logic attached (e.g. third party escrow, without third party having access to the money) -- and all without the need of a centralized authority or PKI system. Those are the real values of the bitcoin system.

Mind you, there are a few downsides too - potential to create transactional race conditions if you control enough of the system; difficulty changing into other currencies; architectural decisions yet to be ironed out about how to scale to a mass audience.

Lack of ability to reverse a transaction could also be seen as a negative in certain lights -- no "visa, cancel this charge, they scammed me".

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