No. of Recommendations: 20
At what price did you first decide that BTC had no value?A. (no value as an investment) First time I heard about it.
B. (utility as an offbeat currency) I thought it reasonably possible.
Were you right or were you wrong?A. Right. It can never pay a coupon even on ultimate liquidation if any, so it has no intrinsic value as an investment by definition.
B. Looks like I was mostly wrong, though I underestimated the real world utility for money laundering once good mixers were available.
As a capital good it can be an interesting vehicle for price speculation, and it is likely to have a market value well into the future, but it's not an investment. It also has substantial and proven value as a story and industry for taking money from other people in so many different ways, many of them legal. Bitcoin has great beauty as conceptual art, and arguably the world's greatest-ever construction of a solution in search of a problem. I don't hold anything against those who own it, nor do I mock them. People own lots of things that don't interest me, for all kinds of reasons, and good for them.
I am however happy to mock their reasoning sometimes, which is as subtle but important difference.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/nanacoin If more people adopt it the price goes up. To be more technically accurate, the price trend will go up only so long as there is continually increasing demand to hold (not transact) it at any given price. I can't see any reason that could be a never-ending trend. And I would call that the main reason it doesn't exactly score a perfect zero on the Ponzi-meter. The most useful comparison is that Bitcoin aspires to achieve the strength of consensus to take the place of gold as a store of value, which famously has had the same real purchasing power for millennia without getting any net higher in price. (even as the global number of people who more-or-less believe in it as a store of value has risen by a factor of 50+). To believe that the price of bitcoin will go up in price forever is essentially a religious belief--plainly wrong, but immune to argument, so there any useful discussion ends.
The fact that the price of bitcoin has gone up a lot so far is (rather obviously) NOT a proof of the religion's central tenet.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/029... (aka "you get the price you deserve")
It should be noted that the South Sea Company was in fact an investment, not a mere speculative capital good, as there was a theoretical possibility of the underlying asset (the company) turning a profit.
Jim
