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Comment by lottin | Hacker News Reader

The expected discounted value of all bitcoin's future cash flows is zero. This is because the only cash flow that a bitcoin investor can expect from an investment in bitcoins is the revenue from selling the bitcoins in the market... and the market value of something that has no use case and is held for speculative purposes only (i.e. has no intrinsic value) will tend to zero in the long run.

A fiat currency that is issued by the government has no intrinsic value either, but there's one crucial difference compared to a cryptocurrency: in the case of a government-issued fiat currency the central bank will intervene the market, by making use of its prerogative to conduct monetary policy, to ensure price of the currency doesn't drop to zero.

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My house also doesnt generate cash flow/interest by itself, must have an intrinsic value of zero. Surprisingly it can be used as collateral for a loan as long as other people assign a (however disputable) value to it. So, of course you could be right when all (not just you) other people decide that BTC has a value of zero. Meanwhile i use my BTCs as collateral. Value is more of a social judgment, not a law of nature. Hence the misconception?

Houses do generate income, called "rent". Either you rent out your property and get paid an explicit rent, or you live in the house in which case you get paid in kind. So, bad example!

Agreed. How much future cash flow does a kilogram of gold generate?

Gold has very little "intrinsic" (industrial) value. Most of its value is pure speculation. Would you say gold and bitcoin are rather similar then?

Like bitcoin, gold is too a "bubble asset", but unlike bitcoin, gold is a physical object with use value and limited availability.

The thing about gold is that its price appears to to be negatively correlated with the economic cycle. Because of this some people argue that it makes sense to include it in a portfolio of stocks and bonds, so that the volatility of the portfolio is reduced, although personally I would advise against it.

And this has proven successful in many countries such as Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and Argentina

Generally speaking it has been successful, more so than the gold standard. It's true that sometimes states fail, but that's not something a monetary system can prevent from happening, or insure against.

And the Bitcoin blockchain is just another state, with just another monetary system, which you can diversify into or not, and it can fail or not.

A blockchain is not a state. A state is a political entity that rules a territory through the monopoly of violence.

https://write.as/no-time-like-tomorrow/a-blockchain-is-a-sta...

Sorry to say, but you're deluded. A blockchain is made of "information". Information has no coercive power. A blockchain can't enforce laws. It can't stop illegitimate violence. It can't perform any of the functions of a state. Not even remotely.

Leaving the gold standard has been so successful, as evidenced by the inflation crisis leading to rising cost of living and housing shortages in every western country.

Inflation and a rise in the cost of living are different things. Inflation means an increase in the (nominal) price level, whereas the cost of living is measured in real prices, specifically real wages.

Inflation is an increase in the money supply, which is why it's called inflation - the money supply inflates. I know a lot of government economists like to define it as rising prices because then there is no word for increasing the money supply which is very convenient for them and the governments they work for.

No, it's not just government economists. It's the standard definition in economics. But that's beside the point... the BIG mistake you're making is confusing an increase in nominal prices (inflation, or whatever you want to call it) with an increase in real prices (a rise in the cost of living).

A fiat currency is indeed just an accounting unit, but it has some floor against falling to zero, as it can legally extinguish any debt, and is needed to pay taxes.

Even so, sometimes they fall to basically zero. What chance does crypto have when sentiment turns against it?

Your definition of "worthiness" is entirely flawed. It seems to be base on some random economics textbook definition of "value".

I am getting tired of repeating the exact same thing on HN, but TL;DR:

    . there is no such thing as intrinsic value, it is a fundamentally flawed concept.

    . the only reliable tenet in economics (as in: having always be observed to work) is the law of supply and demand, which "value" derives from: if demand>supply, value appears. End of story.

    . why there is demand in the first place is a many-colored and complex affair, which economist recurrently (and predictably) fail to analyze and forecast.

Asset pricing theory is a well established field within economics. Of course it comes down, in the end, to the law of supply and demand, but that doesn't mean that we have to stop here. The law of supply and demand doesn't explain why there's a supply and a demand in the first place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_pricing

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