Bitcoin Critiques and Rebuttals | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin Critiques and Rebuttals

casebitcoin.com

14 pointsjanandonly9 comments

I’m sorry, but after reading a few of these “rebuttals”, it’s really clear it’s just nonsense. These are not rebuttals, they are basically going around the argument and saying that it doesn’t matter in the case of bitcoin.

Isn’t it absolutely obvious to any economist that “intrinsic value” is a real thing, and that the value of an apple is something entirely different from the value of, say, gold? And the rebuttal is… intrinsic value is a flawed concept?

To me it looks like someone is trying really hard to not understand the critique, and write some sort of reasoning why it doesn’t matter.

Many people might consider it obvious but as far as I know, intrinsic value isn't a concept in modern economics. Whatever someone is willing to pay is what that thing is worth to that person, that's it.

“Intrinsic Value” is absolutely a thing in economics, and describes that the value of an asset is intrinsic or contained within the asset itself.

It’s not necessarily the same as economic value, but to say that it isn’t a concept sounds like the type of FUD that the article spreads.

Besides, it’s not as if it’s difficult to understand that, say, the economic value of food (or stocks in some business if you prefer) is something different from a currency. By focusing on whether “intrinsic value” is real or not is focusing on syntactics, without even considering the underlying argument. That makes it an incredibly poor rebuttal.

Well I googled, and you're right, the concept does exist. Here's wikipedia's entry on intrinsic theories of value: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsic_theory_of_value

It mentions Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, but nothing in modern economics.

The only other thing I found for "intrinsic value" involved investors looking at the values of companies, but that's investing, not economics.

Of course it's impossible for me to prove a negative. Maybe you could respond with a link of your own, describing the role of intrinsic value in modern economic theory?

You keep focusing on the term “intrinsic value”, while ignoring the underlying argument. Is it that difficult to understand that the value of things such as food, real estate, stocks is something entirely different from a currency?

The fact that they stick a price ticker at the top before getting to the content speaks volumes (pun!).

Regardless of what cryptocurrency could have been what it did become is an incredibly sleazy speculative craze with all the worst financial instruments of the past 200 years speedrun.

Although to be fair I can’t think of a use case outside of evading authorities, so I suppose this was inevitable.

At this point I just wish there was a killfile mechanism built into HN. I know I can run some local proxies and there are third party pages to achieve this, but I just want to filter every article that's $somehow flagged as "crpyto" ("currency", not actual cryptography)

You can't make some of this stuff up.

>Bitcoin's decentralized nature makes it impossible for anyone, even governments, to fully kill it.

Can the government kill any shitcoin really? Hell, Luna is trading at $0.0001. Therefore, it is not dead! Therefore Luna is the future!

>Furthermore, the cat's out of the bag, so to speak. In the US, several members of congress already own bitcoin, and the list of elected (and unelected) officials who take pro-bitcoin stances publicly is getting longer.

Since some powerful peoples' salary depends on them not understanding bitcoin critiques, bitcoin is the future!

>Additionally, adoption of bitcoin and cryptoassets continues to grow rapidly.

I'm going to try you to get you to invest in bitcoin by telling you lots of people are investing in bitcoin!

I mean it's nice that all the arguments and rebuttals are presented in an easy-to-read format. Unfortunately, many of them are still very weak rebuttals.

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