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Comment by jonnathanson | Hacker News Reader

Likely it will be a little worse than break-even, because there are always some people out there willing to attempt to generate coins even if what they are doing doesn't financially make sense, breaking the market.

I'd guess that the percentage of miners and speculators in the BTC market who are economically irrational in their activities is a lot higher than most of us think it is. Ergo, I don't place too much faith in any models, theories, or projections about this market that lean heavily on assumptions of rational actors.

Following from this logic, I can't justify taking a significant position in this market. The risk is enormous, and as risk goes, it's not incredibly attractive compared to alternative investment vehicles or strategies.

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Not to mention the lack of proper regulation. Particularly at the exchanges: http://nerdr.com/bitcoin-exchange-scam-bitcoins-are-worthles...

I was days away from entering the Bitcoin marketplace until I read that. Now I realize it's speculation propping up an artificial market price. Saying that, I would be open to hearing opinions on estimates of the true value of a Bitcoin, based on it's use cases and value proposition if anyone has any...

I would be open to hearing opinions on estimates of the true value of a Bitcoin

Forget it. Nobody knows. It's a function of how big the Bitcoin economy gets, and how many Bitcoins people decide to keep in their wallets. (It's convenient to keep some amount, to save the hassle of doing conversions all the time, but the volatility of the currency may well dissuade most people from keeping large amounts.)

The "true value" of a Bitcoin is zero -- it's just some bits on a computer. In the same way, the "true value" of paper currency is very close to zero -- I guess you could use it for note-taking. The market value of Bitcoin will depend on the demand to own Bitcoin, as opposed to any competing commodity or currency.

Common myth, but it's false. Paper currency's true value is that the issuer is obligated to do something in return for it. Since that's usually governments, paper currency's true value is that you can use it to pay debts to that government. Everybody in the world can stop using US Dollars for anything else, but they'll still be useful for that, because that is basically the definition of a US Dollar. Says so right on the bill.

You can set your philosophical bar of "real value" higher than that, but there's not much light of day between that and a standard so high that it's not even theoretically reachable, at which point I stop caring about your definition of "real value" since when nothing can meet the bar, it's not a useful concept anymore. (But I do mean "not much", not "zero".) In the end, all value stores are transient on a century timescale, and I don't see that changing. Even gold hasn't had anything like a constant value. But for a putative currency, BitCoin is distinctive in its total disconnection from a concrete value.

Governments are typically not bound to continue accepting payment in today's currency tomorrow. There have been many cases of government arbitrarily redenominating their currencies and/or their debts.

I don't think we're really arguing here. My comment was meant to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but nonetheless most currencies share the property that their value in trade is decoupled from their inherent value. Back to the OP's question, there is no such thing as a real value of a BitCoin, it comes down to how much someone else is willing to exchange (in barter, currency, gold, whatever) at any particular moment.

How is that a scam? He charges $1.05 for a BTC when everyone else is charging $1.00. That's not a scam, that's just setting your own prices. Unless I am missing something here.

In reality, where people use money to purchase goods and services, the exchanges cannot unilaterally decide to advertise a best bid and offer price worse than reality and then pocket the difference.

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