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Comment by jwolfe | Hacker News Reader

Not that gold has a massive magical intrinsic value. That was also arbitrary.

It is hard to mine and hard to find.

If you make a fresh piece of gold and show it to the world, you are proving that you have done some known — or at least bounded — amount of work.

In gold’s case, that work is gas, electricity, and human labor. If someone shows up with gold that cost less to produce, the price goes down.

> proving that you have done some known — or at least bounded — amount of work

Work for the sake of work is not valuable.

You could record video proving that you dug a hole 20 feet deep with your bare hands and then filled it up again.

That's a lot of work, but it wouldn't be valuable to anyone, except maybe as comedy.

The video wouldn't be valuable, because it's trivial to duplicate.

However, should it be impossible to copy videos and the only way to do a video would be to capture the events as they happen, then perhaps your video would have value.

I'm surprised there aren't a ton of NFTs for videos of people digging holes and filling them up, riffing on both "proof of work" and keynesian ideas.

Why do actual work when you can just sell somebody elses as your own?

The reasoning behind keynesian gold digging is that rich people will not accept that the government hands out money to poor people because that would threaten private businesses who are dependent on cheap labor. To make sure that the government money doesn't compete with private money you just force people to do worthless work so that working as a waiter for minimum wage is still more attractive than digging holes in summer heat. The entire point is that digging holes sucks. Meanwhile cryptocurrencies glorify digging holes.

Well cards against humanity did that and the hole was worth over 100k!

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/28/cards-aga...

And exactly that happened to aluminium. After its discovery its cost was bigger than gold. Until more effective ways to ectract it were discovered. That does not mean that aluminium is useless.

> If you make a fresh piece of gold and show it to the world, you are proving that you have done some known — or at least bounded — amount of work

Making origami pirate ships also requires a certain amount of work. That doesn’t give it value.

Much like Ethereum, gold has an actual use post discovery/creation but your origami crane does not (outside of artistic value and testing for replicants) - GP did not go into the details, but they chose an appropriate analogy - origami cranes, not so much. Fun trivia: NASA uses a bunch of gold https://spinoff.nasa.gov/spinoff1997/hm2.html

Value density is the differentiator. The amount of work required to produce a single ounce of gold is many orders of magnitude greater than the ancillary costs of storing or transporting that ounce.

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