| > I'm no stock expert but isn't the majority of a stock's value due to speculation on what it will be worth one day in the future? That's true, but stock can represent a portion of an asset with production potential. A factory or a mine or a dot-com. Bitcoin is pure fiat money. If I owned all stock in AAPL, I would own one of the most valuable companies in the world which would yield me several billion USD in profits every year. If I owned all bitcoins my asset would be completely worthless because there would be no market for it. I defer to Warren Buffett's quote [1] on Gold - an asset similar in it's uselessness: > Today the world's gold stock is about 170,000 metric tons. If all of this gold were melded together, it would form a cube of about 68 feet per side. (Picture it fitting comfortably within a baseball infield.) At $1,750 per ounce -- gold's price as I write this -- its value would be $9.6 trillion. Call this cube pile A. > Let's now create a pile B costing an equal amount. For that, we could buy all U.S. cropland (400 million acres with output of about $200 billion annually), plus 16 Exxon Mobils (the world's most profitable company, one earning more than $40 billion annually). After these purchases, we would have about $1 trillion left over for walking-aroundmoney (no sense feeling strapped after this buying binge). Can you imagine an investor with $9.6 trillion selecting pile A over pile B? [1] http://www.nasdaq.com/article/why-warren-buffett-hates-gold-... |
Of course, but you could say the same about having the entire internet to yourself. Or being the only person on Facebook. That's just a function of how networks work.