[vec]

But all cryptocurrencies are not equally valuable, and there's no reason to think that all of any given crypto won't eventually equally be worth (arbitrarily close to) $0.

I can imagine a lottery where usually nobody wins anything but every now and then everyone who bought a ticket wins collectively. It's still a lottery.

[pixie_]

How is that different from any other asset? One day it can be valuable, the next it might not. It doesn't change the fact that it is immutable.

[vec]

Other assets are tied to real phenomena.

With stocks, for example, I can make a prediction about a company's future performance, buy or short accordingly, and expect that if I am correct I will profit.

I may be wrong about my prediction, but if I am correct then I've got far better than chance odds of also being correct about the future price of the asset.

Without making any further predictions about the state of the world I can equally easily imagine the price of Bitcoin in 5 years being $100 or $100,000. Neither price feels "wrong" the way it would if, say, Google's stock price rose or dropped by an order of magnitude without the company changing anything.

[pixie_]

A bitcoin is as real as anything else. It's ones and zeros stored in a distributed ledger on computers around the world. I'm sorry you're having trouble predicting the price, look up supply and demand. Either way it doesn't make it any less real.

[vec]

I don't dispute that a Bitcoin is a real, discrete thing. What I'm arguing is that it's a self-contained thing. The price of a Bitcoin is not anchored to anything outside the Bitcoin ecosystem.

With other assets, there's a clear causal arrow leading from outside the system back in. If Google the company performs better, Google the stock will overwhelmingly tend to perform better. If Google the company folds, Google the stock will overwhelmingly tend toward being worthless. The asset is a proxy for something that isn't the asset.

Bitcoin doesn't appear to work the same way. There's no obvious not-Bitcoin that demand for Bitcoin is a function of. It's a proxy for itself, after a fashion. That doesn't mean it has no value, but it does feel uncomfortably self-referential when compared to almost any traditional asset class.

[pixie_]

Crypto's value is derived from its usefulness as a currency. It has many advantages over current fiat systems. You can expect if it's practical adoption expands then it's value will go up.

[adrr]

Company has assets that can be liquidated. Even if people decide a company has no value there's still assets that can be liquidated to provide capital back to shareholders. If people decide a crypto is worthless, its worthless.