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Comment by mdorazio | Hacker News Reader

"Want" has nothing to do with it. If people are willing to pay money for a service, that service is by definition valuable. Many thousands of people are willing to pay money in the form of gas fees to transact on the Ethereum network, so the network must be providing value. Whether you think the endpoints (assets/coins/whatever) themselves have value is irrelevant.

I have a feeling that whatever definition you're using for crypto to say it isn't valuable could also be applied to an awful lot of startups and more generally to current stock market prices...

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> If people are willing to pay money for a service, that service is by definition valuable.

This is only true if you define "value" to mean "people are willing to pay money for it."

But that's a useless and circular definition. It's only tolerated because assuming that money is a proxy for value was useful for making crude models in economics.

You're welcome to provide a better definition.

"Value" is providing a benefit that is greater than the cost.

Benefit and cost to whom? If I use your definition and apply it to individuals, that's exactly how money works. If I'm willing to pay for something then it must have more value to me than the money I am paying, otherwise I wouldn't pay for it. So if people are paying for crypto or crypto services then those things must be providing enough benefit to be valuable.

To the parties involved. I think the question is -- what is the value to the party buying cryptocurrency? Outside of gambling, that's not clear to me. Which is not to say there is no value!

> If I'm willing to pay for something then it must have more value to me than the money I am paying, otherwise I wouldn't pay for it.

I disagree. People pay for stuff of no value to them all the time, for various reasons. That someone is willing to pay doesn't automatically mean it has value to them, although it does heavily imply it.

If 1000 people participate in lynchings and pay money to enact them do lynchings have value?

Very comfortable saying that my definition of value is opposed to many companies and startups

To those people? Yes, by definition. You seem to be conflating value to individuals with value to society, which is a massively different thing.

And what utility are they extracting, exactly? It's incorrect to assume that a willingness to pay is always indicative of durable underlying value. See every bubble ever, for example.

The real problem in the world of crypto is that it's gone through many boom and bust cycles without real innovation to match. The future of what crypto could deliver is as speculative now as it was five years ago.

You've redefined general value to "durable underlying value". I'm not even sure what you would consider that to be outside of physical assets. Does GitHub have durable underlying value? I would strongly argue it does not, but it's still valuable because it provides something people find enough use for to pay money.

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