It's interesting to say that $8B of new value was created, since no one could supply that money if anyone asked for it.
How did the cryptocurrency markets handle that, anyway?
How did the cryptocurrency markets handle that, anyway?
Fed: "Hold my beer..."
What does this mean? BCH can be sold for USD, and there are people willing to buy BCH. Therefore BCH created $8B in new value.
The $8B in value created is entirely nominal, because of the size of the pre-existing supply. In reply the real value created could well be negative or at most in the millions and not billions.
That's not how economics work.
edit: I suppose all these stocks I'm holding are worth $0, since if every person selling them sold tomorrow the value would drop to that price.
To take the 100 shares at $500 example from @stanmancan, if one person is willing to pay $500, another 10 is willing to pay $400 for one share each, and one more person is willing to pay $300 for 20 shares, and one large investor is willing to buy up the rest for $100 only, the total demand for the whole company is $14,400 for 100 shares or $144/share. That's the true value.
I can guarantee you that there isn't even an order of magnitude close to $8B of demand for the artificially created and restricted BCH, so that value wasn't really created.
Anyways, I'm not trying to argue that the value of that hypothetical company is $14,400. I'm trying to argue that it's not anywhere near $50k. (Disproving the GP's example that BCH created $8B of value overnight.)
The $8B figure for BCH is using the exact same semantics that every other non-cash asset in the entire world uses. But because it's crypto we get pedantry like this.
Bitcoin: "I'm going to create $8B out of thin air"