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One of the things that has kept me out of the cryptocurrency space is that when their advocates discuss value, they speak in pure nonsense. A big part of that

by jerf 4y ago

One of the things that has kept me out of the cryptocurrency space is that when their advocates discuss value, they speak in pure nonsense. A big part of that problem is that value is very difficult to discuss. On the one hand you have the classic goldbug that insists that gold has "intrinsic value", which is some sort of platonic ideal thing that gold simply ambiently has and defies any attempt to nail down what it grounds out in. On the other hand you have cryptocurrency advocates claiming that all value is arbitrary and/or based entirely on scarcity. In that context, observing that my kid's doodles are scarce but not valuable is not a cute tweet; it is a complete and utter demolishing of the argument. (I think one of the things education can accidentally (mis)teach is that short arguments are always worthless and arguments must always be long. This is false. A good grounding in mathematics can help with internalizing this. It is completely possible to demolish entire massive argument edifices in 10-20 of the correct words, and the fact that the "other side" has deployed literally hundreds of thousands of words does not make them right if the foundation is rotten.) Value is intrinsically a dynamic process. It grounds out in human desires, which are intrinsically temporal, variable, and fickle, and this makes a lot of people uncomfortable as they seek either a more solid or a more completely ethereal/arbitrary base. However, there is no other sensible way to think about value, however complex and ever-shifting this may be, and it is neither mathematically solid, nor an amorphous vapor of no consequence subject to one strong person's Nietzschian will.

mbar84 4y ago
Sounds like you might become a fan of the Austrian School theory of subjective value and (in the context of Crypto currency) of Mises's regression theorem of money. https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2014/03/on-bitcoin-and-ludwig-von-mises-regression-theorem.html https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2014/03/on-bitcoin-and-ludw...
ted_bunny 4y ago
"Mathemetics" Is this the regurgitative didactic method I keep hearing about?
- jerf 4y ago
  Ah yes, sorry, fixed. Meant to spell "mathememetics" correctly.
  - pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
    Mathememetics, the study of the spread of ideas that seem rigorous, but aren’t.
WalterBright 4y ago
The value of something is simply what other people are willing to pay for it.
- Phiwise_ 4y ago
  The marginal revolution is dead. Long live the marginal revolution!
- r00fus 4y ago
  The issue is the aggregation of such a volatile concept such that entire markets can be based on such pricing model. That way lies the enablement of massive fraud.
- maxbond 4y ago
  You're conflating price and value. I'm going to repost a comment I made a month ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32857769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32857769 > It's important to note that price, the last traded price, and value are all distinct concepts. The last traded price is the only one of these we can measure ahead of time, so we often use it as a metanym for these other concepts. ... > When the oil futures went negative, it wasn't the case that the value of oil was negative - this was about the structure of the market and the sorts of positions people were caught in when the pandemic hit. We continued to consume oil throughout the pandemic, and so I'd say we continued to value it. > Another example would be, if a rancher has a lot of cow poop, they might pay a farmer to take it away. You could say that the cow poop has a negative price on it. But the farmer is going to make use of it as fertilizer; from the farmer's perspective, this is a commodity that has value. > It's true though that there are a million theories of value and it's impossible to say what something's value is definitively, you can only make a decision about what is value is to you. I'd expand that you actually have to define what value means to you, relative to the context in which the discussion is taking place. You'll likely find yourself considering value from different perspectives in different situations; I find myself doing so.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    > You're conflating price and value. The negotiated final price is the value. > When the oil futures went negative, it wasn't the case that the value of oil was negative The value of the futures is different than the value of the oil itself. Besides, the end result of a future is taking delivery. Most futures contract buyers have no intention of taking delivery, and have no way to take delivery. That explains the negative value of those futures. > I'd expand that you actually have to define what value means to you, relative to the context in which the discussion is taking place. You'll likely find yourself considering value from different perspectives in different situations That doesn't change at all the fact that the value is determined by what someone is willing to pay for it. That value is different for different people, as you say.
skybrian 4y ago
Some human desires are more predictable. You can ground out some value in basic human needs: food, clothing, shelter. They imply land value (for example, agricultural land) and energy usage (heat, transport, production) though not in a straightforward way. And various security measures can be valuable because any of the above could be taken away. This doesn't imply stable prices, though. Far from it!
Aeolun 4y ago
While I fully agree with your point, the next time I see some collective delusion of a pyramid scheme I’ll buy in early. It doesn’t matter that there’s no logic to it, as long as enough people share the same delusion it becomes self-propagating.
- PeterCorless 4y ago
  This is what makes marks so unremarkable.
- bluGill 4y ago
  How do you know if things are early though? Some go longer than others, so you can see some quack getting attention and buy in - just in time to be the last fool as everyone else realizes it is garbage. Or it can continue to go up - you have no way to know.
  - jjkaczor 4y ago
    For myself, personally - that's an easy metric... By the time I hear about something, it's too late.
    - BossingAround 4y ago
      There are ten, if not hundreds, failed pyramid schemes for every one on which you could make money. The schemes are not made for you. The way to earn money off of pyramid schemes is to create one. Whether bitcoin is just a pyramid scheme or not, only time will tell. I don't believe so, but I'm not an economist, so who am I to say :).
    - hoosieree 4y ago
      I bought some cryptocurrencies on Coinbase about a year ago. Today I figured was as good a time as any to cash out. My net loss was about 70%. I'm fortunate that this was a small amount relative to my net worth to count as a fun "experiment" and not a significant chunk of the money I need to survive. Based on this N=1 experiment, I now feel justified in suggesting more profitable and environmentally friendly endeavors, such as lighting half your money on fire.
Nav_Panel 4y ago
> Value ... grounds out in human desires You wouldn't believe how rare it is for me to meet someone who agrees with this. I'm in leadership at a web3 company and I need to reiterate this point over and over again. NFTs don't have intrinsic value OR arbitrary value. ERC20s don't have intrinsic value OR arbitrary value. If it doesn't tie back into user psychology, it's not worth anything. Interesting historical note is that one of Freud's original metaphors for understanding the nature of desire was the unconscious "investor" or "capitalist" who outlays affective charge to the conscious "entrepreneur", who relates to objects. This is known in the literature as Freud's "economic metaphor", which I've found immensely helpful in my own understanding.
- NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
  >You wouldn't believe how rare it is for me to meet someone who agrees with this. I'm in leadership at a web3 company and I need to reiterate this point over and over again. NFTs don't have intrinsic value OR arbitrary value. ERC20s don't have intrinsic value OR arbitrary value. If it doesn't tie back into user psychology, it's not worth anything. I came to a similar conclusion: The sole criterion for the viability of a currency is acceptance in trade. This simple truism explains every currency that "works" and every one that didn't all at once. It can be a terrible currency, but if it's generally accepted in trade, too bad. Governments can mandate it, but that won't always save it. Just look at Zimbabwe dollars. They were official. And all but worthless. USD is accepted worldwide, even though its based on less than even a shitcoin, and 90% of it doesn't physically exist according to the Fed themselves.
  - duped 4y ago
    > USD is accepted worldwide, even though its based on less than even a shitcoin The full faith and credit of the the United States government is pretty solid. > and 90% of it doesn't physically exist according to the Fed themselves. That's how debt works
    - hahajk 4y ago
      What does "The full faith and credit of the the United States government" mean? You can't redeem dollars bills for anything from the govt as far as I know.
JamesSwift 4y ago
> observing that my kid's doodles are scarce but not valuable is not a cute tweet; it is a complete and utter demolishing of the argument. Scarcity is not quantity. Its the relationship between supply and demand. In your scenario, supply (1 kid doodling) meets demand (1 person wants them), so the value doesnt move from 0 (which is how much you would pay for the doodles).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bryananderson 4y ago
  That’s the previous commenter’s point, isn’t it? The crypto advocates claim that crypto has intrinsic value simply because of its scarcity (supply-side only). The commenter’s rebuttal is that if this were true, their kid’s doodles would be extremely valuable, yet they are not because only the parent treasures them (demand-side). With gold, one can come up with a plausible story for the demand side of the argument that it has intrinsic value: gold’s combination of beauty and scarcity has made it a potent status symbol across many eras and cultures (not to mention its industrial uses). With crypto, it’s much harder to imagine what the demand side of the story is. There’s a finite supply of Bitcoin, and people demand it because… well, it’s not because they can pay for anything with it. They mostly seem to demand it because they believe someone else will pay them more for it in the future. And what do we call it when an asset has nothing going for it besides that hope? I’m still waiting for a compelling story about why demand for Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency will persist beyond the current vogue, which is driven by the notion that “it’s gonna be huge in the future”. How long can people keep the faith, and what happens to demand if and when they stop?
  - Eisenstein 4y ago
    I have contended that the only use for cryptocurrency which provides value for people is for anonymous transactions for which cash is not an option or a poor option. The only cryptocurrency that can do this that I know of is Monero. Therefore Monero will have lasting value. Whether you can make money speculating on it is dubious, which is probably why not many people do. * Note: I am speaking regarding the markets I know; I cannot say anything regarding economies suffering rapid inflation or which lack access to banking
crooked-v 4y ago
> It is completely possible to demolish entire massive argument edifices in 10-20 of the correct words, and the fact that the "other side" has deployed literally hundreds of thousands of words does not make them right if the foundation is rotten. See also the "Gish gallop" [1], a strategy that relies on spewing out a huge number of specious arguments and half-truths that are each individually time-consuming to refute, and to which the correct response is usually just to refuse to engage with the bullshit. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
  I had a Bitcoin fan in his 40s tell me IRL that BTC, not blockchain, mind you, is an improvement over the gene. Something about passing information between generations. I could not follow the argument. All this time, banks have been hoarding details about our deposits, withdrawals, balances, transfers, payment and purchase histories that could have been "inherited" like genetic information by our descendents. Even worse, banks could have been making the data public so "tech" companies can collect it for free. You just cannot make this stuff up.
  - jerf 4y ago
    This sounds related to the observation that one of the powers of human civilization is move evolution out of the DNA genes and into culture. We use electricity not because we have electricity-using genes, but because we have the genes that allow us to support a culture that knows how to use electricity. However it is beyond me to translate that into the blockchain specifically. This seems like yet another case where in the phrase "distributed ledger", the "ledger" is doing all the work and the "distributed" isn't doing much. And there isn't much work being done either; most of our "culture" isn't in ledgers. Even if you take the broad view that I do that a lot of things like our technology are actually embedded in human relationships ("Hmmm, I remember Bob knows how to solve this problem... ah yes, I bet Sally knows the solution to this... I bet Ramash could hook me up with the right part for this problem...") and things beyond just formal transfer mechanisms like "books" and "classes", ledgers still aren't carrying much of that water.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
trompetenaccoun 4y ago
The article as well as your comment (which doesn't even reference what is discussed in the blog post) are perfect examples for how narratives form in this strange new world. None of it has anything to do with NFTs or cryptocurrency except for the name. Everywhere people consume media, be it on Twitter or Amazon, they're bombarded with scams and nonsensical computer-generated content. Those not inclined to dig deeper soon start to believe the fake stuff is what the idea is really about. There has always been misinformation, but not on this level. Only a few years back, when someone wanted to write a scam book, they still had to actually sit down and write it, no matter how carelessly. Now that this isn't needed anymore, it amazes me that someone would as much as look at - let alone buy and read - books on buzzword topics by random unknown authors. Same goes for the consumption of social media feeds.
hackernudes 4y ago
If you make up what people say and then argue with them it's pretty easy to win. The "classic goldbug" insists that gold has properties that are good for a currency (does not degrade, can be divided, does not rely on a trusted third party, has scarcity) and it has been used as currency for a long time in civilisation. I take "intrinsic value" for commodities to mean "has use aside from being a currency", for example gold is used in jewelry (does not tarnish, is soft, is pretty?) and electronics. The non-intrinsic value would be its use as a currency. If a goldbug argues all the value of gold is intrinsic, they are confused because the price of gold would probably be much lower if it had no use as a currency. Bitcoin-bugs make similar claims to gold, plus it can be sent over the internet and is more scarce than gold. As for intrinsic value for Bitcoin, it doesn't really have one I guess. Or maybe you could make an argument about other things built on top of its blockchain like smart contracts or timestamping services? In summary, I agree that an argument of value from "pure scarcity" is bad, but I don't think it is a common belief!
- LordDragonfang 4y ago
  >Bitcoin-bugs Might I suggest: bitbugs. (Also, "Don't let the bitbugs byte")
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  It's not just a few goldbugs thinking the intrinsic value is all of the value, it's tons of them that think the intrinsic value provides a solid floor. At this point the currency/speculative/prestige value is almost all of the value of gold. If you had a pile of gold and it dropped down to its intrinsic value, it'd be almost the same as a drop to zero.
  - roenxi 4y ago
    > At this point the currency/speculative/prestige value is almost all of the value of gold It isn't a currency, it has no obvious potential to be a currency and if you own it you are either a government or insulted. At best, only speculative value could be a factor of these 3, and I don't think the serious money that sets the price is speculating - and gold is a terrible market to speculate in, so they probably aren't setting the price as much as going broke. The value of gold is set by how hard/easy it is to mine.
aaroninsf 4y ago
A-class critique of the grounding of value. I will add that there seems to be a substantial correlation between people who are made uncomfortable by the reality of socially-constructed value, and the social construction of many other "foundational" things, such as "truth" and its relationship to natural language, which flows naturally into self-delusional "originalism" when it comes to interpreting say the Constitution. Or for that matter the Bible. which in turn are deeply correlated with autocratic-leaning and socially-conservative politics which favor rigid hierarchies and privilege authority and respect for it, over other values (such as equity, compassion, etc.) I find it remarkable how many people are made uncomfortable even in otherwise well -educated circles by the premise that in natural language meaning is negotiated and collaborative and requires not absolutes of the universe but rather agents who maintain representations and models of one another's states, beliefs, intentions, etc., against which every utterance is measured and its meaning triangulated. I guess if you got a degree in EECS rather than say CogSci it's possible to never encounter even anemic instrumental models of this in a pragmatic linguistics class... :/
lukas099 4y ago
Actually a child's doodle is immensely valuable.
foobiekr 4y ago
They also don't understand the basic concept of losses. "It's only a loss if you sell" is alive and well in the Bitcoin space. They'll even argue this if you teach them the difference between realized and unrealized losses.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  On the other side of the same coin there is realised and unrealised gains. You only gained something if you sold it at profit. In general any speculation have been in very weird headspace recent years. Have to see if it continues, but moving forward things might be different.

by jerf 4y ago

mbar84 4y ago

Sounds like you might become a fan of the Austrian School theory of subjective value and (in the context of Crypto currency) of Mises's regression theorem of money. https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2014/03/on-bitcoin-and-ludwig-von-mises-regression-theorem.html https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2014/03/on-bitcoin-and-ludw...

ted_bunny 4y ago

"Mathemetics" Is this the regurgitative didactic method I keep hearing about?

jerf 4y ago
Ah yes, sorry, fixed. Meant to spell "mathememetics" correctly.
- pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
  Mathememetics, the study of the spread of ideas that seem rigorous, but aren’t.

WalterBright 4y ago

The value of something is simply what other people are willing to pay for it.

Phiwise_ 4y ago
The marginal revolution is dead. Long live the marginal revolution!
r00fus 4y ago
The issue is the aggregation of such a volatile concept such that entire markets can be based on such pricing model. That way lies the enablement of massive fraud.
maxbond 4y ago
You're conflating price and value. I'm going to repost a comment I made a month ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32857769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32857769 > It's important to note that price, the last traded price, and value are all distinct concepts. The last traded price is the only one of these we can measure ahead of time, so we often use it as a metanym for these other concepts. ... > When the oil futures went negative, it wasn't the case that the value of oil was negative - this was about the structure of the market and the sorts of positions people were caught in when the pandemic hit. We continued to consume oil throughout the pandemic, and so I'd say we continued to value it. > Another example would be, if a rancher has a lot of cow poop, they might pay a farmer to take it away. You could say that the cow poop has a negative price on it. But the farmer is going to make use of it as fertilizer; from the farmer's perspective, this is a commodity that has value. > It's true though that there are a million theories of value and it's impossible to say what something's value is definitively, you can only make a decision about what is value is to you. I'd expand that you actually have to define what value means to you, relative to the context in which the discussion is taking place. You'll likely find yourself considering value from different perspectives in different situations; I find myself doing so.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  > You're conflating price and value. The negotiated final price is the value. > When the oil futures went negative, it wasn't the case that the value of oil was negative The value of the futures is different than the value of the oil itself. Besides, the end result of a future is taking delivery. Most futures contract buyers have no intention of taking delivery, and have no way to take delivery. That explains the negative value of those futures. > I'd expand that you actually have to define what value means to you, relative to the context in which the discussion is taking place. You'll likely find yourself considering value from different perspectives in different situations That doesn't change at all the fact that the value is determined by what someone is willing to pay for it. That value is different for different people, as you say.

skybrian 4y ago

Some human desires are more predictable. You can ground out some value in basic human needs: food, clothing, shelter. They imply land value (for example, agricultural land) and energy usage (heat, transport, production) though not in a straightforward way. And various security measures can be valuable because any of the above could be taken away. This doesn't imply stable prices, though. Far from it!

Aeolun 4y ago

While I fully agree with your point, the next time I see some collective delusion of a pyramid scheme I’ll buy in early. It doesn’t matter that there’s no logic to it, as long as enough people share the same delusion it becomes self-propagating.

PeterCorless 4y ago
This is what makes marks so unremarkable.
bluGill 4y ago
How do you know if things are early though? Some go longer than others, so you can see some quack getting attention and buy in - just in time to be the last fool as everyone else realizes it is garbage. Or it can continue to go up - you have no way to know.
- jjkaczor 4y ago
  For myself, personally - that's an easy metric... By the time I hear about something, it's too late.
  - BossingAround 4y ago
    There are ten, if not hundreds, failed pyramid schemes for every one on which you could make money. The schemes are not made for you. The way to earn money off of pyramid schemes is to create one. Whether bitcoin is just a pyramid scheme or not, only time will tell. I don't believe so, but I'm not an economist, so who am I to say :).
  - hoosieree 4y ago
    I bought some cryptocurrencies on Coinbase about a year ago. Today I figured was as good a time as any to cash out. My net loss was about 70%. I'm fortunate that this was a small amount relative to my net worth to count as a fun "experiment" and not a significant chunk of the money I need to survive. Based on this N=1 experiment, I now feel justified in suggesting more profitable and environmentally friendly endeavors, such as lighting half your money on fire.

Nav_Panel 4y ago

> Value ... grounds out in human desires You wouldn't believe how rare it is for me to meet someone who agrees with this. I'm in leadership at a web3 company and I need to reiterate this point over and over again. NFTs don't have intrinsic value OR arbitrary value. ERC20s don't have intrinsic value OR arbitrary value. If it doesn't tie back into user psychology, it's not worth anything. Interesting historical note is that one of Freud's original metaphors for understanding the nature of desire was the unconscious "investor" or "capitalist" who outlays affective charge to the conscious "entrepreneur", who relates to objects. This is known in the literature as Freud's "economic metaphor", which I've found immensely helpful in my own understanding.

NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
>You wouldn't believe how rare it is for me to meet someone who agrees with this. I'm in leadership at a web3 company and I need to reiterate this point over and over again. NFTs don't have intrinsic value OR arbitrary value. ERC20s don't have intrinsic value OR arbitrary value. If it doesn't tie back into user psychology, it's not worth anything. I came to a similar conclusion: The sole criterion for the viability of a currency is acceptance in trade. This simple truism explains every currency that "works" and every one that didn't all at once. It can be a terrible currency, but if it's generally accepted in trade, too bad. Governments can mandate it, but that won't always save it. Just look at Zimbabwe dollars. They were official. And all but worthless. USD is accepted worldwide, even though its based on less than even a shitcoin, and 90% of it doesn't physically exist according to the Fed themselves.
- duped 4y ago
  > USD is accepted worldwide, even though its based on less than even a shitcoin The full faith and credit of the the United States government is pretty solid. > and 90% of it doesn't physically exist according to the Fed themselves. That's how debt works
  - hahajk 4y ago
    What does "The full faith and credit of the the United States government" mean? You can't redeem dollars bills for anything from the govt as far as I know.

JamesSwift 4y ago

> observing that my kid's doodles are scarce but not valuable is not a cute tweet; it is a complete and utter demolishing of the argument. Scarcity is not quantity. Its the relationship between supply and demand. In your scenario, supply (1 kid doodling) meets demand (1 person wants them), so the value doesnt move from 0 (which is how much you would pay for the doodles).

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bryananderson 4y ago
That’s the previous commenter’s point, isn’t it? The crypto advocates claim that crypto has intrinsic value simply because of its scarcity (supply-side only). The commenter’s rebuttal is that if this were true, their kid’s doodles would be extremely valuable, yet they are not because only the parent treasures them (demand-side). With gold, one can come up with a plausible story for the demand side of the argument that it has intrinsic value: gold’s combination of beauty and scarcity has made it a potent status symbol across many eras and cultures (not to mention its industrial uses). With crypto, it’s much harder to imagine what the demand side of the story is. There’s a finite supply of Bitcoin, and people demand it because… well, it’s not because they can pay for anything with it. They mostly seem to demand it because they believe someone else will pay them more for it in the future. And what do we call it when an asset has nothing going for it besides that hope? I’m still waiting for a compelling story about why demand for Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency will persist beyond the current vogue, which is driven by the notion that “it’s gonna be huge in the future”. How long can people keep the faith, and what happens to demand if and when they stop?
- Eisenstein 4y ago
  I have contended that the only use for cryptocurrency which provides value for people is for anonymous transactions for which cash is not an option or a poor option. The only cryptocurrency that can do this that I know of is Monero. Therefore Monero will have lasting value. Whether you can make money speculating on it is dubious, which is probably why not many people do. * Note: I am speaking regarding the markets I know; I cannot say anything regarding economies suffering rapid inflation or which lack access to banking

crooked-v 4y ago

> It is completely possible to demolish entire massive argument edifices in 10-20 of the correct words, and the fact that the "other side" has deployed literally hundreds of thousands of words does not make them right if the foundation is rotten. See also the "Gish gallop" [1], a strategy that relies on spewing out a huge number of specious arguments and half-truths that are each individually time-consuming to refute, and to which the correct response is usually just to refuse to engage with the bullshit. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
I had a Bitcoin fan in his 40s tell me IRL that BTC, not blockchain, mind you, is an improvement over the gene. Something about passing information between generations. I could not follow the argument. All this time, banks have been hoarding details about our deposits, withdrawals, balances, transfers, payment and purchase histories that could have been "inherited" like genetic information by our descendents. Even worse, banks could have been making the data public so "tech" companies can collect it for free. You just cannot make this stuff up.
- jerf 4y ago
  This sounds related to the observation that one of the powers of human civilization is move evolution out of the DNA genes and into culture. We use electricity not because we have electricity-using genes, but because we have the genes that allow us to support a culture that knows how to use electricity. However it is beyond me to translate that into the blockchain specifically. This seems like yet another case where in the phrase "distributed ledger", the "ledger" is doing all the work and the "distributed" isn't doing much. And there isn't much work being done either; most of our "culture" isn't in ledgers. Even if you take the broad view that I do that a lot of things like our technology are actually embedded in human relationships ("Hmmm, I remember Bob knows how to solve this problem... ah yes, I bet Sally knows the solution to this... I bet Ramash could hook me up with the right part for this problem...") and things beyond just formal transfer mechanisms like "books" and "classes", ledgers still aren't carrying much of that water.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

trompetenaccoun 4y ago

The article as well as your comment (which doesn't even reference what is discussed in the blog post) are perfect examples for how narratives form in this strange new world. None of it has anything to do with NFTs or cryptocurrency except for the name. Everywhere people consume media, be it on Twitter or Amazon, they're bombarded with scams and nonsensical computer-generated content. Those not inclined to dig deeper soon start to believe the fake stuff is what the idea is really about. There has always been misinformation, but not on this level. Only a few years back, when someone wanted to write a scam book, they still had to actually sit down and write it, no matter how carelessly. Now that this isn't needed anymore, it amazes me that someone would as much as look at - let alone buy and read - books on buzzword topics by random unknown authors. Same goes for the consumption of social media feeds.

hackernudes 4y ago

If you make up what people say and then argue with them it's pretty easy to win. The "classic goldbug" insists that gold has properties that are good for a currency (does not degrade, can be divided, does not rely on a trusted third party, has scarcity) and it has been used as currency for a long time in civilisation. I take "intrinsic value" for commodities to mean "has use aside from being a currency", for example gold is used in jewelry (does not tarnish, is soft, is pretty?) and electronics. The non-intrinsic value would be its use as a currency. If a goldbug argues all the value of gold is intrinsic, they are confused because the price of gold would probably be much lower if it had no use as a currency. Bitcoin-bugs make similar claims to gold, plus it can be sent over the internet and is more scarce than gold. As for intrinsic value for Bitcoin, it doesn't really have one I guess. Or maybe you could make an argument about other things built on top of its blockchain like smart contracts or timestamping services? In summary, I agree that an argument of value from "pure scarcity" is bad, but I don't think it is a common belief!

LordDragonfang 4y ago
>Bitcoin-bugs Might I suggest: bitbugs. (Also, "Don't let the bitbugs byte")
Dylan16807 4y ago
It's not just a few goldbugs thinking the intrinsic value is all of the value, it's tons of them that think the intrinsic value provides a solid floor. At this point the currency/speculative/prestige value is almost all of the value of gold. If you had a pile of gold and it dropped down to its intrinsic value, it'd be almost the same as a drop to zero.
- roenxi 4y ago
  > At this point the currency/speculative/prestige value is almost all of the value of gold It isn't a currency, it has no obvious potential to be a currency and if you own it you are either a government or insulted. At best, only speculative value could be a factor of these 3, and I don't think the serious money that sets the price is speculating - and gold is a terrible market to speculate in, so they probably aren't setting the price as much as going broke. The value of gold is set by how hard/easy it is to mine.

aaroninsf 4y ago

A-class critique of the grounding of value. I will add that there seems to be a substantial correlation between people who are made uncomfortable by the reality of socially-constructed value, and the social construction of many other "foundational" things, such as "truth" and its relationship to natural language, which flows naturally into self-delusional "originalism" when it comes to interpreting say the Constitution. Or for that matter the Bible. which in turn are deeply correlated with autocratic-leaning and socially-conservative politics which favor rigid hierarchies and privilege authority and respect for it, over other values (such as equity, compassion, etc.) I find it remarkable how many people are made uncomfortable even in otherwise well -educated circles by the premise that in natural language meaning is negotiated and collaborative and requires not absolutes of the universe but rather agents who maintain representations and models of one another's states, beliefs, intentions, etc., against which every utterance is measured and its meaning triangulated. I guess if you got a degree in EECS rather than say CogSci it's possible to never encounter even anemic instrumental models of this in a pragmatic linguistics class... :/

lukas099 4y ago

Actually a child's doodle is immensely valuable.

foobiekr 4y ago

They also don't understand the basic concept of losses. "It's only a loss if you sell" is alive and well in the Bitcoin space. They'll even argue this if you teach them the difference between realized and unrealized losses.

Ekaros 4y ago
On the other side of the same coin there is realised and unrealised gains. You only gained something if you sold it at profit. In general any speculation have been in very weird headspace recent years. Have to see if it continues, but moving forward things might be different.