5 ms·

So scarcity pays no role in value? Is the Mona Lisa not valuable? If money is printed it doesn't lose value? Why would Bitcoin collapse if it was used at "any"

So scarcity pays no role in value? Is the Mona Lisa not valuable? If money is printed it doesn't lose value? Why would Bitcoin collapse if it was used at "any" scale? Low max transactions per second? It is used by some people (even if not many) to pay for real things as well as wages! Are you saying an "economic" transaction has to be a commodity or taxes? I think any specific currency is valuable because people believe it is so. No single characteristic defines value.

theplumber 4y ago
I think Bitcoin will have as much value as the hypercard protocol has now. It's not really as valuable as Mona Lisa but you could say it has some value.
mjburgess 4y ago
Every crypto coin trading at 0USD is likewise scarce. You need to pay attention to the actual economic transactions taking place. Looking at a graph of pure speculative value and calling it an economy is, more or less, a scam. You'll see that when it all disappears.. moreso than the cashflow of, eg., an actual business.
- hackernudes 4y ago
  It is true that not all scarce things are valuable. But isn't scarcity is a good quality for a currency? Fiat currencies fail because of money printing. I think many cryptocurrencies are useless and driven purely by marketing and speculation and most tokens are unregulated securities. Bitcoin is someone's attempt at inventing an "ideal" currency and it is being bootstrapped into value and existence. How else could it work? Maybe it will fail, maybe not. > Imagine BTC was actually used for any scale of economic transactions. It would collapse overnight. You never explained why and I am honestly interested in your reasoning here. Are you implying BTC can't scale? It seems like two contradicting thoughts - if it is used, then it becomes less valuable.
nixpulvis 4y ago
Another issue of HN debates values.
wolframhempel 4y ago
Scarcity can support existing value - e.g. in creating a Gold Standard or some other means to artificially limit money supply - but it is not an intrinsic value. There are countless things that are both scarce and valueless. I believe your last two sentences hit the nail on the head (albeit being oxymoronic). Things have value because people are willing to pay for them. That's it. If companies can be traded below book value, Tesla can be worth more than the next five automakers combined and NFTs can cost six digits there seems to be no intrinsic value.
hans1729 4y ago
>So scarcity pays no role in value? Is the Mona Lisa not valuable? You're mixing up things. I can draw a one-off picture, that doesn't make the drawing valuable (sadly. If you want to buy my paintings, hmu). The value needs to be attributed by a shared denominator, which for the example of Mona Lisa is cultural prestige. Crypto has zero inherent cultural prestige, it's only value lies in social attribution. Wallets on hard drives are meaningless unless we decide that they aren't. The mona lisa isn't worth what it is if we decide otherwise, but it does have inherent value. Crypto does not. For crypto to have value, someone else needs to pay Dollar/Euro/whatever at an exchange. That's the value of crypto - the exchange rate.
- kwertyoowiyop 4y ago
  NFTs = attempted cultural prestige for crypto?
  - hans1729 4y ago
    Ha, nice. Problem: art receives value wrt the artwork, not the canvas, so the screenshot-meme wins. (Unless the cultural prestige lies in the underlaying technology itself, in which case the piece of art is the blockchain-implementation, not embedded content)
    - cowtools 4y ago
      Sure, but it is a suitable canvas, is it not? If an artist signs an NFT or Colored Coin with a keypair that is associated with their public identity, shouldn't that be analogous to an autograph? If a physical, signed artistic work has more value than an unsigned work, does that mean that if you take the physical artistic work out of the equation you're left with the value of the signature? It's a funny question I guess. Like imagine people collecting PGP autographs. Maybe art has some intrinsic value, but I think a large part of the "value" of an art piece is associated with the cultural relevance of the piece. It would follow that if you can associate a transaction output with some cultural relevance in the same sense that traditional artwork does, then it could have value, albeit not much.
    - 4y ago
scoopertrooper 4y ago
> Is the Mona Lisa not valuable? That's such a silly argument. There are thousands of paintings around the world with the same level of scarcity as the Mona Lisa, but have far less value. Scarcity drives up prices on items that already have some perceived value. It doesn't create any value itself.

theplumber 4y ago

I think Bitcoin will have as much value as the hypercard protocol has now. It's not really as valuable as Mona Lisa but you could say it has some value.

mjburgess 4y ago

Every crypto coin trading at 0USD is likewise scarce. You need to pay attention to the actual economic transactions taking place. Looking at a graph of pure speculative value and calling it an economy is, more or less, a scam. You'll see that when it all disappears.. moreso than the cashflow of, eg., an actual business.

hackernudes 4y ago
It is true that not all scarce things are valuable. But isn't scarcity is a good quality for a currency? Fiat currencies fail because of money printing. I think many cryptocurrencies are useless and driven purely by marketing and speculation and most tokens are unregulated securities. Bitcoin is someone's attempt at inventing an "ideal" currency and it is being bootstrapped into value and existence. How else could it work? Maybe it will fail, maybe not. > Imagine BTC was actually used for any scale of economic transactions. It would collapse overnight. You never explained why and I am honestly interested in your reasoning here. Are you implying BTC can't scale? It seems like two contradicting thoughts - if it is used, then it becomes less valuable.

nixpulvis 4y ago

Another issue of HN debates values.

wolframhempel 4y ago

Scarcity can support existing value - e.g. in creating a Gold Standard or some other means to artificially limit money supply - but it is not an intrinsic value. There are countless things that are both scarce and valueless. I believe your last two sentences hit the nail on the head (albeit being oxymoronic). Things have value because people are willing to pay for them. That's it. If companies can be traded below book value, Tesla can be worth more than the next five automakers combined and NFTs can cost six digits there seems to be no intrinsic value.

hans1729 4y ago

>So scarcity pays no role in value? Is the Mona Lisa not valuable? You're mixing up things. I can draw a one-off picture, that doesn't make the drawing valuable (sadly. If you want to buy my paintings, hmu). The value needs to be attributed by a shared denominator, which for the example of Mona Lisa is cultural prestige. Crypto has zero inherent cultural prestige, it's only value lies in social attribution. Wallets on hard drives are meaningless unless we decide that they aren't. The mona lisa isn't worth what it is if we decide otherwise, but it does have inherent value. Crypto does not. For crypto to have value, someone else needs to pay Dollar/Euro/whatever at an exchange. That's the value of crypto - the exchange rate.

kwertyoowiyop 4y ago
NFTs = attempted cultural prestige for crypto?
- hans1729 4y ago
  Ha, nice. Problem: art receives value wrt the artwork, not the canvas, so the screenshot-meme wins. (Unless the cultural prestige lies in the underlaying technology itself, in which case the piece of art is the blockchain-implementation, not embedded content)
  - cowtools 4y ago
    Sure, but it is a suitable canvas, is it not? If an artist signs an NFT or Colored Coin with a keypair that is associated with their public identity, shouldn't that be analogous to an autograph? If a physical, signed artistic work has more value than an unsigned work, does that mean that if you take the physical artistic work out of the equation you're left with the value of the signature? It's a funny question I guess. Like imagine people collecting PGP autographs. Maybe art has some intrinsic value, but I think a large part of the "value" of an art piece is associated with the cultural relevance of the piece. It would follow that if you can associate a transaction output with some cultural relevance in the same sense that traditional artwork does, then it could have value, albeit not much.
  - 4y ago

scoopertrooper 4y ago

> Is the Mona Lisa not valuable? That's such a silly argument. There are thousands of paintings around the world with the same level of scarcity as the Mona Lisa, but have far less value. Scarcity drives up prices on items that already have some perceived value. It doesn't create any value itself.