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Comment by feanaro | Hacker News Reader

> Whereas virtually 100% of all money invested into crypto has been burned by miners. This is pretty easy to model.

People like Bitcoin's provable global ledger and this is where the value lies. The value is not burned, it's embedded into this ledger.

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In some religious rituals, devotees offer luxury items to gods to appease them. These are items like new clothes, food, maybe even non-metallic jewelry. These are subsequently burned on a pyre by the way of offering them to the gods. Bitcoin is like that, only now you have a receipt on the blockchain. I like it.

The value is not embedded in the ledger. Miners need to keep mining for all of eternity to maintain the security of the ledger. The featured article explains this point quite well. Ask yourself what would happen if miners stop mining?

If miners were to stop mining the difficulty (the computing power needed to mine blocks of transactions) would drop and people like me would start mining. So where did all the existing work go? It went into improving the security of the chain that my mining program is adding blocks to. That basically means that for someone to completely rewrite the provenance of all the bitcoin before the point where miners stopped mining, they’d have to replicate the same amount of work that was originally put into making that history. With less people of ordinary means working on the chain, the security of the blocks generated will be decreased. This is because it would then be easier to launch attacks on the chain and erase history and double spend, but the community could easily be rebuilt to a point where it is no longer feasible for a malicious actor to compete with the miners again.

> People like Bitcoin's provable global ledger and this is where the value lies.

What real world value has this brought?

The ability for the Chinese rich to get money out of their country. For one.

And for another, it allows ransomware gangs to much more easily extract payments from their victims as well.

> People like Bitcoin's provable global ledger and this is where the value lies. The value is not burned, it's embedded into this ledger.

Aren't you just stating that Bitcoin has absolutely no intrinsic value?

What is "intrinsic"? Nothing has intrinsic value.

Gold has inherently good conductivity, extreme malleability and pretty good chemical resistance. I would call those intrinsically valuable traits.

Likewise a whole slew of physical goods, who have built-in traits due to what they are that make them (on some level) valuable.

Bitcoin only has value due to a shared hallucination.

Most of the value of gold is not due to those properties. Yet even for those properties, if you look close enough, it is shared hallucinations all the way down.

I think you'll also have a hard time explaining how "good conductivity" is fundamentally different from e.g. "resistance to tampering of historical records".

Bitcoin is only resistant to tampering of historical records if you have a continuous expenditure of compute to maintain that tamper-proofness.

In the absence of substantial compute resources dedicated to maintaining the longest fork, there is in principle nothing stopping anyone from changing a historic blok and rolling forwards from that.

The good conductivity is a base physical property, not really requiring any external investment of anything to be maintained.

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