Hacker News Reader

Comment by rsynnott | Hacker News Reader

> BitCoin has a genuine inherent worth now

Does it? Why? I mean, people currently want to buy it, but then in the early to mid noughties people wanted to buy securitised junk mortgages; simply having a potentially temporary demand does not mean it has an _inherent_ worth.

If anything, it has less of a worth than before, in that its "success" has made it largely useless for actual transactions. Look at the current costs to actually get anything through; it's stormed past SEPA and threatening to hit Western Union levels of expense (it's already exceeded Western Union and friends for small transactions). What is it _for_?

View on HN

> What is it _for_?

It's a global immutable ledger that allows for the irreversible transfer of funds without needing to trust a 3rd party with the control of those funds.

Additionally, there's a cap on the total units of account that can exist.

Many people find a lot of value in all that, especially when compared to the slowness, surveillance, and inflation of traditional electronic monetary systems.

Plenty of surveillance and slowness on bitcoin.

It's working as designed. The debate is on how to change the design, right?

Furthermore, aren't the "lite" alternatives more functional in this regard?

What about the buying power transfer issue? If Bitcoin is valued at $50 and then you pay $100, every single coin before your purchase has been bumped up by 100% value - and it will be future people that are paying for that, that money (someone's time/effort or resources) don't just magically get generated. This is only stable if there is continuous adoption and I wonder what the end point looks like for the 'late' adopters.

>simply having a potentially temporary demand does not mean it has an _inherent_ worth.

Just to serve as devil's advocate here:

Nothing has an inherent worth, unless you postulate the existence of "worth" as an immaterial label, like "soul".

BitCoin clearly has worth to some people right now. They keep buying it.

Sure, but with most things, there is demand for them either because owning them yields dividends (stocks) or because they are required for doing something else (commodities); the demand is based on utility. Bitcoin obviously doesn't pay dividends, and is increasingly useless due to the ludicrous transaction fees, so it increasingly looks like the value is being driven mostly by speculation/expectation of capital gain. This is, historically, unsafe.

My impression is that most people buy Bitcoin, expecting to sell them at higher price, while claiming that it won't crash because it has real use.

Well, tulips are also quite useful. You can't decorate your garden with Bitcoins...

>Nothing has an inherent worth, unless you postulate the existence of "worth" as an immaterial label, like "soul".

It seems odd to me that if the utility of anything were a physical thing as measurable as the mass of any physical object that thing wouldn't still have an "inherent" utility/worth. Are you thinking about "inherent" in the sense of have some sort of Platonic existence? That would be a very odd way of using it.

Either way, since utility is unique up to scalling (e.g. Johnny could get as many times of it from a sandwich as Paul does from a near-identical sandwich), at least in choice theory "worth" is closer to having an "inherent" character than otherwise. Though this is somewhat of a stretch because these kind of comparisons are invalid.

>Either way, since utility is unique up to scalling (e.g. Johnny could get as many times of it from a sandwich as Paul does from a near-identical sandwich), at least in choice theory "worth" is closer to having an "inherent" character than otherwise. Though this is somewhat of a stretch because these kind of comparisons are invalid.

Johnny, who is dying of thirst in the middle of the Sahara desert, would get much more utility from a bottle of water than Paul, who is sitting in a bathtub in his apartment in NY. So what's the worth of the bottle of water?

Is that what you meant by having to appeal to "soul"?

There still doesn't need to be an appeal to anything in material in order to define worth, not anymore than one needs to appeal to something immaterial do define weight in terms of mass. Have the utility of water be proportional to the thirst of the person, where thirst is also a definable physiological state, with "worth" being a scale factor. Thus "worth" would have a uniquely defined value regardless of person or situation.

Or at least that's one way to do it.

"My kingdom for a horse."

Valuations 101, by William Shakespeare.

There are many things that have an inherent worth. This inherent worth stems from their utility. Land will always have a certain amount of worth because you need to put things in locations. Metal has a worth because you can build things with it.

That worth may fluctuate and it may not be worth something to you in particular, but it has a value.

Cryptocurrencies only have worth because they have demand, not utility. There is not inherent worth based on their existence. This doesn't make them less valuable, it just means their value isn't inseparable from what they are.

But one can always invalidate arguments by taking to them to the extremes. After all, you can't prove anything exists, so how can any of it have inherent anything?

All value is future value.

"This inherent worth stems from their utility." Ergo, it's not inherent.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com