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Comment by alphabettsy | Hacker News Reader

My house protects me. Food feeds me. My iPhone from China does many many things that I find useful. Bitcoin hopefully allows me to accumulate wealth but otherwise adds no value to my life.

Doesn’t seem like an appropriate comparison.

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Food feeds you, but many people choose to eat food that is wasteful. Your home protects you, but many people live in large homes in climates that require heating and cooling. Your iPhone from China does things you like, which really is what this comes down to. You like iPhones. You don't like Bitcoin. There is nothing more to this argument other than preferences.

Seems more like your initial point slipped quite a bit into farce since you made it.

There’s no argument that people do things and use things that are wasteful, but what does Bitcoin do? What utility does it currently provide?

And yea, I’ll keep my bitcoin holdings under one percent of my overall investments if I continue to hold it at all. At this point I only have it because of FoMo.

I don’t know why people are so obsessed with “Bitcoin’s utility.” So many things in our life have little utility other than being pleasurable. Many people get on planes to go on vacation purely because it feels good to get away. They don’t ask themselves “what utility does my vacation have?” Even if Bitcoin was just a speculation market, that would still be a considerable amount of enjoyment for people. Many people love to gamble after all. And of course, we know Bitcoin can be used as a store of value, used to transfer value quickly across the globe, and used to implement smart contracts.

Because they're looking for some reality-based reason for its value, so as to judge whether it's currently over or under-valued and can rate, like with stocks listed on the NYSE, whether it's time to buy, hold, or sell. There are exceptions in the market eg Tesla, with it's P/E of ~200, or GME and the WSB nonsense, but most other stocks have a P/E ratio based on fundamentals. Fundamentals that bitcoin utilitarians are looking for in cryptocurrency and are coming up short.

Investors might want to understand Bitcoin's utility for that reason. I don't think this applies to Bitcoin's critics, however.

Permission-less transactions and wealth storage are an unprecedented technology, people living outside of authoritarian regimes struggle with this concept.

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