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Comment by gcb0 | Hacker News Reader

this is only "possible" because etherium has even less real value than btc.

btc still have intrinsic value as it is traded for chinese expating money, scared Venezuelans, American weekend drug users, etc.

etherium exists for the sole purpose of playing investing with btc. everyone I know who owns etherium bought after they decided to buy btc and got a price hike on their investment so they flip btc and etherium instead of btc and usd. because they see it as two things that ever goes up. ha.

this is the most perfect scenario for a pump and dump. intentional or not.

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Today, yes, more people accept BTC for real-world goods than ETH. I, and most ETH holders, are betting that tomorrow that may not be the case. The strength of a cryptocurrency is the strength of it's platform, and Ethereum is basically Google to Bitcoins Yahoo, or Facebook to Myspace, take your pick.

The reason? It's an applications platform, not just a currency. It brings fundamental innovations in decentralized computing that means it can reach places Bitcoin never could. And when that happens, the utility (and price :) of ETH will match.

Events like this happen on currency exchanges as well.

So unless you are suggesting the Swiss national currency is also not as valuable as bitcoin your hypothesis doesn't hold up.

ethereum has 70% of the market cap of bitcoin.

it's worth more than bitcoin was worth ~3 months ago

market cap is worthless when we talk about fiat currency.

but ethereum/bitcoin aren't fiat currencies?

market cap is useful in that it shows the total value of the coin. Comparing the price of 1BTC to 1ETH doesn't make sense, but comparing their market cap does

> ethereum/bitcoin aren't fiat currencies

The alternatives to fiat money are commodity money, e.g. gold, or representative money, e.g. pieces of paper exchangeable for gold at a fixed rate. Cryptocurrencies are more similar to fiat money in terms of their value being a function of social agreement versus utility.

gcb0 isn't proposing that value should be measured in ETH per BTC. Sounds like they think the value of currency is in people using it for a medium of exchange--e.g., Oversatock.com accepting bitcoin makes bitcoin valuable.

"Useful" might be a better term, but it makes some sense to equate those two.

>but ethereum/bitcoin aren't fiat currencies?

Fiat currencies are created by fiat (legal declaration). No government created either, so no, they are not fiat currencies.

you can assume that the bitcoin/ethereum code-base are the modern/digital version of a legal declaration.

But I meant in the sense that they don't have intrinsic value like gold.

Well you cannot eat, drink or breath gold either... Gold is impossible to fake, but ETFs based on double-counted collateral and various other fixing fixes have made it a fool's errand to preserve capital with gold.

Well they have no intrinsic value like gold. And the code could be considered a legal framework that acts as a contract for how BTC/ETC are valued.

Well gold also has little intrinsic value. Of course, it has uses like in the manufacture of technology, but most gold is used for making useless shit into shiny useless shit. Crypto has uses, too though. Such as facilitating payments, DLT, etc.

All value is assigned. So, what then, besides traditional consensus, makes gold 'intrinsically valuable' without also making cryptocurrencies intrinsically valuable?

Bitcoins have intrinsic value until the hash is broken and gold has intrinsic value until we can make it from neutrons, protons and electrons

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