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> I am presently incapable of seeing how any token other than Bitcoin will be the one that wins. In some sense, Bitcoin has already "won" in that it currently

• codexon 12y ago
  Just because something is bought for money doesn't mean it actually has value. Ask anyone that has been in a ponzi scheme or stocks that went to 0.
  • darkmighty 12y ago
    Actually if a wide market will pay for a good at a certain moment, it certainly has momentary value. The future of the good doesn't preclude that.
  • baddox 12y ago
    You gave examples of assets that did not turn out to have positive value in the future. They absolutely had value at the time they were purchased.
    • deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  • drcode 12y ago
    I disagree- The value of something is "what you can get someone to pay for it." That is the only concrete, objective, and rational way to determine value. > Ask anyone that has been in a ponzi scheme/stock that went to 0 Well, given that you're stipulating a value of zero then clearly you are unable to get someone to pay for it and it's value is zero, by definition.
    • codexon 12y ago
      A ponzi scheme has a net value of 0 or less at any point in time. Just because some people can get out more than they put in doesn't mean a ponzi scheme has created any value for the economy as a whole.
      • prawn 12y ago
        "value for the economy as a whole" You've shifted the goalposts there from "has value" to "value for the economy as a whole". If I have money in a ponzi and can exit at that point in time, my stake has value. Later it might not, but at that point it does.
        • codexon 12y ago
          So you are saying that drcode means cryptocurrency has value as a ponzi scheme?
          • prawn 12y ago
            ?!? No.
            • codexon 12y ago
              Then how could you possibly think I have "shifted the goalposts there from "has value" to "value for the economy as a whole""?
    • bildung 12y ago
      > I disagree- The value of something is "what you can get someone to pay for it." That is the only concrete, objective, and rational way to determine value. That's perfectly fine, after all value, whatever definition we use, is just a model, nothing that exists outside of humankind. The problem with the definition you prefer, though, is the substantial subset of the economy that will not be available on a market. An economy consists of significantly more production and consumption than what gets sold on a market and therefore gets a price. Examples: Producing free software in your free time, creating music, training kids in a sports club, raising your own kids, teaching for free via youtube channels or moogs or locally etc. All these thing create, well, value, I'd say. They boost both wealth and efficiency of the economy.
  • ttctciyf 12y ago
    I think (think!) that in view of "people trade them for other currencies every day on open markets?" it's pretty clear what's meant is "exchange value"[1], though since "value" can be taken a few different ways and it would probably be better to be explicit about which one is intended. In particular, exchange value or market value can diverge considerably from utility[2], or "use value"[3] - pathologically so in cases like that of the tulip bubble and so on. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange_value http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange_value [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use-value http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use-value
• nunyabuizness 12y ago
  > Why do people keep trying to argue that dogecoin/litecoin/etc/etc don't have value, when people trade them for other currencies every day on open markets? B/c the majority of them care more about their investment than they do about cryptocurrencies as a technology and fear that competition of coins will hinder a successful (aka profitable) exit strategy.
  • greendestiny 12y ago
    Yeah I thought r/bitcoin was a good place to argue against the idea that any altcoin is automatically subsumable by bitcoin. Needless say the downvotes came pretty quick. I think the chance that Bitcoin simply changes to match any competitors is ludicrous. Only consensus changes are possible whilst preserving the Blockchain. Any controversial change that has enough merit will split the market between Bitcoin and an altcoin and divide supporters along those lines. Meaning the holders of Bitcoin become more resistant to change as the altcoin becomes more successful. Its definitely not clear that scenario ends in a change to Bitcoin early enough to defeat the altcoin. I also think the OPs point about the highlander effect isn't well made - a coins mining pool only needs to be strong enough to protect itself from attacks that it's value incentivises.
• Terr_ 12y ago
  The way you're defining "value" makes for a pretty meaningless "victory", unless you believe Dutch Tulips were a true benefit to mankind. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
  • hueving 12y ago
    The way you're defining value is meaningless if you think the tulip bulbs didn't have value during that time. You could trade one for a house during their peak, sounds pretty valuable to me.
    • TeMPOraL 12y ago
      Thus highlighting the difference between monetary value and what is actually useful. It's a difference people get confused about too often - thinking that the most important thing on the planet is the economy; thinking that everything is fungible because it has dollar value. It's all fun and games until we hit resource limits of the planet. Or kill someone. Our economy sucks at pricing in the fact that while we can safely run out of tullips, we can't safely run out of clean air.
      • hueving 12y ago
        Your definition of 'actually useful' is going to be different than everyone else's. Economic value is the only objective value we have.
        • exo762 12y ago
          Assuming that humans make rational economic decisions. Which is false.
          • hueving 12y ago
            The only way to define an economic decision as rational is if it optimizes for the market value. The rational thing to do in the bulb mania was to produce tulip bulbs.
• crazychrome 12y ago
  Value and price are different things in lots of economic theories, e.g. Maxisim
• IkmoIkmo 12y ago
  > Why do people keep trying to argue that dogecoin/litecoin/etc/etc don't have value, when people trade them for other currencies every day on open markets? They have value but it's much more based on speculation. If you look at Bitcoin, there's an ecosystem of millions of users, over 100 thousand merchants including some of the world's biggest companies like Microsoft, hundreds of bitcoin-focused VC-backed startups of which one had a valuation nearing half a billion dollars etc etc. While it's obvious that bitcoins are overvalued in relation to this ecosystem (i.e. a substantial part of its price is based on speculation that the ecosystem will become massively important in the future), there already is a genuine ecosystem out there with decent growth rates. Dogecoin or litecoin don't have that. They have communities that keep them alive but there doesn't seem to be a long term viability. This is different from bitcoin's early days (which didn't have any real ecosystem either at one point) in that bitcoin actually offered something radically new, while litecoin for example isn't innovative, it was the first me-too that didn't totally screw over its early investors in a pump & dump scheme so it's stayed around but it doesn't offer anything special. Does that mean they have no value? Absolutely not. They do. But 'me-too' companies also have value in the short-term. In the long term they usually don't survive. We're already seeing that, litecoin for example dropped insanely in price (like 90%) in the past year and that's not just because bitcoin readjusted after late 2013's hype cycle, it crashed against bitcoin itself, too, i.e. the market is already identifying that litecoin versus just bitcoin doesn't have a future in the long-run. And if there's ANYTHING you have to know about bitcoin is that it's almost always spoken about in a long-term frame of reference. If we purely look at the short term then yes, we can say dogecoin & litecoin have value and so does bitcoin, but we would also have to say that all three combined are absolutely insignificant, a drop in the ocean, the size of a mid-cap fund of which there are thousands. The short-term isn't interesting, in the short-term me-toos exist, in the long-run they don't. In short, the reason people say litecoin has no value is not because it's not being traded: that's speculation. It's that it is said to have no utility value over bitcoin. Bitcoin can power any utility litecoin can, with more liquidity, more market participants, more open-source libraries & development, more funding, more security etc. I don't think we'll all be using bitcoins necessarily, but I do believe we'll all be using bitcoin (or no cryptocurrency at all, of course, that's very possible, too). i.e. yes there are niches in digital currency, but the cryptocurrency niches will, I think, if they exist in the long-term, be served by products running on top of the bitcoin network. Anything litecoin or dogecoin can do, a bitcoin treechain or sidechain or payment channel can do but with the above mentioned benefits. It's like saying there are different niches in internet protocols, as if to say the internet may run on many different protocols that serve different niches in the long-term, instead of saying TCP/IP powers the internet and it has higher-level protocols that serve niches like http or smtp. Within that line of thinking, anything but TCP/IP has no long-term value and any niche in internet technology will be built on top of that one protocol. Similarly many who say 'litecoin has no value' think of bitcoin as being the protocol for value transfer, and anything having to do with transferring value (or titles, contracts etc) will be built on top of it, rather than along side it. In short, the claim that litecoin has no value (despite having a market value) makes a lot of sense depending on what you believe about the future of cryptocurrency.
• joe_coin 12y ago
  To be clear, I don't claim that non-Bitcoin cryptocurrencies do not have value. You're right that their de facto value is revealed through trading activity on exchanges. I view value as subjectively revealed by market prices, not through any sort of labor theory of value or other nonsense. I'm arguing that non-Bitcoin CCs don't really add any marginal value to the CC ecosystem, and that it's inherently unstable for multiple CCs to coexist. Whatever rationalizations people are making to justify mining Litecoin and holding onto it (ignoring sunk costs of Scrypt ASICs) are inconsistent with reality.
  • jdbiggs 12y ago
    Hey, can we get you on our TechCrunch bitcoin podcast this or next week? email me at john @ techcrunch dotter com