[SeoxyS]

That's not exactly right. You have to consider the depth of the market and the size of the demand. However many BCH are in existence, there's no way that the market will support liquidating them all for USD. An order of that size would crash the markets instantly.

The $8B in value created is entirely nominal, because of the size of the pre-existing supply. In reply the real value created could well be negative or at most in the millions and not billions.

[cloakandswagger]

So what you're saying is that the value of any asset that is not USD (stocks, bonds, commodities, real estate) is completely unknown, and the real "value" would be what that asset would sell for if every portion of it was instantly liquidated tomorrow?

That's not how economics work.

edit: I suppose all these stocks I'm holding are worth $0, since if every person selling them sold tomorrow the value would drop to that price.

[SeoxyS]

If you're going to put a specific value on something, it's be much more accurate to calculate it as the sum of the entire demand for that something divided by its quantity.

To take the 100 shares at $500 example from @stanmancan, if one person is willing to pay $500, another 10 is willing to pay $400 for one share each, and one more person is willing to pay $300 for 20 shares, and one large investor is willing to buy up the rest for $100 only, the total demand for the whole company is $14,400 for 100 shares or $144/share. That's the true value.

I can guarantee you that there isn't even an order of magnitude close to $8B of demand for the artificially created and restricted BCH, so that value wasn't really created.

[stanmancan]

I'm not sure that's accurate either. That just says that the people who want to buy [Share|BTC|BCH|Whatever] value it less than those who currently hold it.

[SeoxyS]

It's not perfect either, I agree. It's hard and subjective to define what the real true value of something. But one common way is to define it as "what someone will pay for it" -- that's the math I did above.

Anyways, I'm not trying to argue that the value of that hypothetical company is $14,400. I'm trying to argue that it's not anywhere near $50k. (Disproving the GP's example that BCH created $8B of value overnight.)

[stanmancan]

actually you’re right, your stocks are worth $0, until you sell them. If the company went bankrupt tomorrow what would happen to the value of those stocks? If there are 100 shares available and someone is willing to pay $500 for a share, but nobody else is willing to pay more than $5, is the company really worth $500*100? Same idea goes for bitcoin cash. Just because there are a few people willing to pay $X00 doesn’t mean every single bitcoin is worth that much.

[cloakandswagger]

Of course, but no one that I know of implied that it did. Any grown adult should know that if the price of gold/oz is stated as $X, or the market cap of the stock market is stated as $Y, that it doesn't mean if all of it was sold tomorrow it would generate X or Y amount of dollars.

The $8B figure for BCH is using the exact same semantics that every other non-cash asset in the entire world uses. But because it's crypto we get pedantry like this.

[stanmancan]

I think the discussion was more regarding the comment:

    Bitcoin: "I'm going to create $8B out of thin air"

That's just really not the case. Sure a bunch of BCH were created out of thin air, but it's not accurate to say $8B was.