[Nursie]

> You can't just create Bitcoin out of thin air

What do you think miners are doing? And with ICOs you can literally just print however many you want.

> I see BTC as being no different to trading stocks, some days you lose and some days you win.

Sure, but with stocks there's usually a company actually doing something.

[sandworm101]

Mines put in work. Jpm can/does create wealth by moving figures around on reports, or by betting one asset against another, without any physical limitation on its actions.

[ro_sharp]

"Moving figures around on a report" is capital allocation. The history of the 20th century suggests this is a valuable and non-trivial activity.

[Nursie]

> Mines put in work.

It's lost work though, and the amount of work is governed only by the level of competition with other miners, rather than the amount of effort involved insome external task.

> Jpm can/does create wealth by moving figures around on reports, or by betting one asset against another, without any physical limitation on its actions.

That's somewhat beside the point.

[eosophos]

> It's lost work though, and the amount of work is governed only by the level of competition with other miners, rather than the amount of effort involved insome external task

It's the cost of securing the network. It's not lost. Fees and rewards pay the miners for the cost of their computing cycles, to provide a secure, very difficult (near impossible) to attack network.

[Nursie]

It's the cost of competing for block rewards, which incidentally secures the consensus, yes. It's the price of decentralisation.

And it's still not an external task, it's a facet of running the currency rather than work that is independently useful.

And it's still conjuring money out of nothing.