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Comment by graeme | Hacker News Reader

Nope. Assets have a sale value and an ownership value.

Suppose a company makes $100,000 per year and this is expected to continue. How much would you pay for it?

Now, suppose it makes $100,000 per year, but for some reason once you have it, no one will buy it off you. How much would you pay for it?

You'd pay less in the second case, but not that much less. The company has a value which it gives to you for having ownership of it.

Meanwhile, bitcoin produces....$0 per year for owning it. The only value is in sale at a higher price. You have to bet on appreciation.

This is something fundamental people often misunderstand about, say, stocks. The price is set by supply and demand for the stock, but the value is determined by the cashflows. Usually price and value move at least somewhat in sync. But if stock markets went insane and valued everything at $0 for some reason, you'd still want to own companies.

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> Now, suppose it makes $100,000 per year, but for some reason once you have it, no one will buy it off you. How much would you pay for it?

Unless the income-producing aspect of the business is dependent on you, there's always someone willing to buy something that produces money.

It was a hypothetical to clarify the issue. Suppose you were cursed by a genie and you could never sell an asset.

In such a world, the $100,000/yr business still has value to you. That was the point.

Hypothetical indeed. Hypothetically, ownership value should be close to sale value.

At the moment I rather see people buying stuff that they think other people might deem valuable in the future, e.g. motivation behind buying TSLA is similar to buying BTC.

The motivation may be the same but TSLA produces electric cars and BTC produces CO2 and crime.

Very close minded on crypto, aren't ya?

I tend to be closed minded towards scams, yes.

If you still put your money down for the stock, the value isn't $0 anymore. It's whatever you value it.

It’s a hypothetical, where the whole world has gone mad except you. Nobody buys. So it has a price you would purchase at, but $0 sale value to you as there are no other buyers. The true value of an asset is separate from the price (which is $0 in this case as you can’t sell it)

A thought experiment to show the difference between price and value. Bitcoin currently has a price. No actual intrinsic value other than the hope of value in the future.

I think it does have intrinsic value - that value lies in allowing some people, in some areas, to circumvent tracking or avoid authorities. To those people, BTC brings value which cannot be had elsewhere. My personal belief is that this is what fuels BTC's value, and the rest is speculation (but then it's similar to stocks).

I don't think that whether it has this property (and value) is in question - the question is how much of BTC's price is fueled by that value.

Fair point. I shouldn’t discount it to zero. (Though in the above example I was arguing it has $0 value to you if you can’t sell it, unlike a company)

What about a company which grows every year but never pays dividends and can't be sold for more than $0? Would you want to buy it for $1? ( I prefer to use $1 because $0 has the problem of indifference )

Even if this company owns the whole world at the end, is it worth even $1?

Yes, because then I am entitled to voting rights so that I can force them to give me the money. Usually, voting rights are a tiny fraction of the stock value.

If I get non-voting shares that do not pay dividends, then these aren't shares, they're just useless scraps of paper. If the only utility I can get from them is being able to point out that I "technically" own the entire world, it is indeed useless.

Maybe I'm willing to pay a dollar for it but certainly not two.

That's a bit like saying what if 0=1. If the company owned the whole world you could launch legal action to make it sell a bit and pay out.

> You'd pay less in the second case, but not that much less.

Given the huge amounts of money that investors will invest in companies that make negative money every year, I think this is (perhaps unfortunately) not at all true in the real world.

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