[yanilkr]

It makes more sense if Bitcoin is viewed as an insurance rather than an investment or a commodity.

It's an insurance against the whole world falling apart. Why would the whole world of finance fall apart? Same reason Roman empire fell part and lost its significance.

Long back 1000$ was a lot of money, later a million $ was a lot of money and then billion $ was a lot of money. In today's news, people are describing events in trillion $ costs. If you extrapolate this trend, money as we know will be losing its value exponentially.

Bitcoin is a money system that is defined very clearly in terms of quantity, creation process and exchange etc. This is a good minimum viable product. It definitely has value just like a commodity. It also has people working on improving it as if it were an ipo'd company.

Just like language and law, bitcoin is a product of "spontaneous order" and our knowledge of traditional finance may not have enough mental tools to value it like another financial product. Some people certainly value it more than other people. Over a long period of time take span of 100 years, it becomes easy to imagine having a bitcoin like digital currency with standardized rules for money creation not controlled by any single party.

[duelingjello]

Sorry, it's not insurance against the world falling apart because cryptocurrencies (Ccs) have no intrinsic worth. With no internet access, no internet or no miners, you can't conduct trades (unless you give wallet PK, but then it still doesn't have worth beyond what you can actually buy with it in a post-internet world).

OTOH, vital, scarce commodities and property have intrinsic worth because they can be used or are valued. Gold, silver, platinum, diesel fuel, guns, knives, equipment, huge tracks o' land

From the begging and until now, Ccs only make sense as a transactional money analog, not an investment other than an extremely speculative (volatile) one that could lose most/all of its value anytime.

If you want to hide money for a couple of days, do some money laundering (j/k), buy some drugs (j/k^2) or send money anonymously, Ccs are great. Please don't put the bulk/large amount of your savings into Cc unless you're leaving a repressive regime or want to give it all to me to avoid taxes. }:D

[kegn]

Nothing has intrinsic value. When you say something can be used or has value, you are speaking subjectively.

To be valuable economically, something just needs to be both scarce and sought after. Just because they are valuable to a specific set of persons does not mean they have intrinsic value.

Pricing of goods and services is emergent in nature, based on demand, scarcity and rate of consumption.

The 'bitcoin hype' is exactly what you are describing when you say:

> Ccs only make sense as a transactional money analog

Bitcoin was designed to just be a general accounting ledger that can't be forged. It is supposed to be a transactional money analog.

The 'value' that you should be investing in when talking about bitcoin is not its price in dollars, but rather that the idea:

The 'value' in bitcoin is that non-mutable accounting ledgers will be more reliable and provide a better account of economic activity over some duration than its pre-existing counterpart. The only way it will lose this is if the security of the system breaks.

[duelingjello]

You're not making an honest argument while making a sweeping generalization and a strawman about something else. Money has value if you can buy things with it. Gasoline has value if you need it. Bitcoin has no value if no one will accept it or trade it. That's reality, not hypotheticals.

[kegn]

I believe you are missing the point I was trying to make.

I was stating that nothing, not even bitcoin or money or gold or water has intrinsic value. Anything can have value to a person who is in need of a seller's goods. That was not my argument. Things have subjective value. Things do not have some mystic intrinsic property that makes them inherently valuable.

[glofish]

I think the point you are making here is that money is legal tender. That puts it into a different category than stuff that is simply valuable.