But they have inherent utility unlike Bitcoins.
(Tulips are obviously not an efficient food source; don't expect to see people eating tulips except in unplanned-for emergencies.)
On top of that, you get tulip traders, who seek to buy tulips from people who value them less and sell them to people who value them more, and speculators who acquire and hold tulips on an expectation that they will be worth more in the future. From there the market can explode and the price can rise far beyond whatever the primary users of tulips are willing to pay.
The weird thing about Bitcoins is there is no floor to their value - their value as a unit of exchange or a store of value depends entirely on how many people are willing to accept them. A Bitcoin is not a tulip that some people want to simply admire or a corporation that has revenue or a parcel of land which has potential. With all those things, you might just want the thing for the thing. With Bitcoin, you only ever want it, either as a store of value or a medium of exchange, because other people also want it.
This is where everything becomes weird. With other markets, tulip or stock or real estate, you can speak of the commodity as being over-valued when speculation drives the price above what the people who want the thing itself are willing to pay. With Bitcoin, you cannot. You can't call Bitcoin overpriced or underpriced because it has no grounding, no price that is independent of demand.
Utility/value is relative - maybe a tulip is worth something to you, but it's not worth anything to me.
I do agree with OP that certain things might not be usefull even tough they currently hold commercial value, I just think Bitcoin is usefull. And I also believe that BTC is usefull in an infectious way.
Regardless, I fell like you're begging the issue. Not all value is relative, some thing are more practically valuable than others and sone, if you look at them objectively, are almost worthless.
I'm not understanding this argument. How can value be dependent on the context and intrinsic at the same time?
If peanut allergy spread to the entire population, would peanuts still have intrinsic value?
This is a facile line of argument. There are reasonable assumptions we can make about how stable a particular context is.
Can you enumerate these "reasonable assumptions"? The idea sounds pretty dubious to me.
And yes, I would say that if the sun exploded, killing all Earth life, nothing would have value, at least not from a human's perspective. This doesn't seem to help the case for intrinsic value.
However, the edge cases aren't imaginary, and they give us a chance to refine our ideas.
Say there is a huge harvest and a town now has much more food than it can eat. A food merchant passes through the town and wants to sell some of his goods, however obviously no one is interested. Has the merchant's food lost its intrinsic value? Why doesn't anyone want it?
We can also consider the vastly different food preferences found all over the world. And so on...
Being a bit pedantic, food isn't really a specific thing, it's an amorphous category. It's literally defined as "anything people eat that provides nutrition", so it almost feels tautological to say that food has intrinsic value.
Finally, almost any other concrete, specific example I can think is much less universal than "food".
http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/lloyd/val...
In each case, the face value is identical but one of the units has an additional possible area of value, extrinsic to the marked face value. You can melt down the silver coin, eat the potato, plant the tulip. This puts a floor on the value of the item - it's worth min(facevalue, extrinsicvalue). Something worth min(facevalue,extrinsicvalue) should be worth more than something worth min(facevalue, 0).
Bitcoin doesn't seem to be something that can be planted, eaten, etc. It doesn't have another area of value, other than being bitcoin.
Until the regime gets the private keys, which isn't unlikely. As soon as cryptocurrencies are widely adopted, regimes will learn about them and not only take the cash but also search for the keys.
When circumventing government, there's also always the question of "how likely is it I will be caught?" and "what happens if I do?". If the penalty is "you get shot in the back of the head" or even just "you spend a year or two in a comfy minimum-security prison" and the probability is "non-zero", most rational people aren't going to assign a high enough value to "not having some money confiscated" to choose circumvention.
Customs can easily catch you smuggling cash, gold and potatoes, but they have no idea you are leaving to cash out your bitcoin in another country.
What is your argument against the inherent utility of owning Bitcoins?