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Comment by cubefox | Hacker News Reader

That's a stupid argument. When someone finds some niche applications of crypto currencies in payment services, or something like that, it's economic value is above zero. But what matters is how close the economic value is to the market value, not whether the economic value is literally zero or not.

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The difference is that I can create an infinite number of different block chains and or crypto coins.

I can restart forks of both bitcoin and Ethereum on my laptop at this moment. I can restart 10 forks each. Or 100.

I cannot do that with gold.

That's irrelevant. You can choose to speculate with literally anything, not just newly invented crypto currencies or gold. Historically people have speculated with tulips and countless other things. The problem is the missing economic value, not whether you can create similar things. It's irrelevant for the economic value of gold whether new elements can be created or not.

> The difference is that I can create an infinite number of different block chains and or crypto coins.

Yes, but Russian Federation uses only one to evade sanctions.

Sure you can create 10 different blockchains but will those have "stable" value 10 years from now?

In China, it's nearly impossible to invest your assets without friends in the government. The government strictly controls conversion of their currency to non-Chinese currencies. As strange as this sounds, but with cryptocurrencies, you can export value from your country to something more stable.

Same goes for many south american countries.

I still wouldn't invest into Bitcoin or Ethereum but I live in the west where there is the rule of law and one can invest into a large variety of asset classes.

Bitcoin holds 57% of total crypto value, Ethereum another 11%, some 15% is in centralized instruments like USDC or XRP, which are not really cryptocurrencies.

In addition to that, there are also 10.5 million altcoins (10000 new are created every day). But all of them together hold just 17% of crypto value. So you can, of course, create another millions of forks, but it won't make a dent in Bitcoin value.

>When someone finds some niche applications of crypto currencies in payment services, or something like that, it's economic value is above zero.

No it isn't. My credit card has an intrinsic value of zero. It might even be negative due to the massive amounts of infrastructure necessary to run it, similarly to bitcoin. The value is in the networks surrounding it, not whatever method Visa uses to move the bits around, be it blockchain, databases, or whatever. And even then, Visa's value add is only a few points on the transaction. It's in no way a speculative asset and if Visa went away tomorrow forever, it would suck for maybe a month while we adjusted to using cash again. In the same vein, if bitcoin went away tomorrow, I wouldn't notice until reading a panicked article about it.

If the US dollar went away tomorrow, however, I'd be happy to have stocked up on ammunition and cured meats.

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