[mym1990]

The only reason anything has value is if people value it...value itself is a social phenomena, and this includes any type of monetary vehicle, whether a government backs it or not. And maybe I have been living in a fantasy world, but your comment about literally all other commodities on earth not being constrained is literally wrong. The study of economics and wealth is rooted in scarcity and the ability or inability to get more of something.

[navaati]

> The only reason anything has value is if people value it...value itself is a social phenomena

That's not totally true, certain things have a more fundamental value in that if you don't get them you die, such as food and shelter. If we were ethereal economic agents living on a free and infinite compute substrate you could say that, in the meantime the Maslow hierarchy makes certains things have intrasical value that other things don't have.

[mym1990]

I'm not going to lie, I have no idea what 'ethereal economic agents living on a free and infinite compute substrate' means. You have bested me this time.

[seibelj]

I disagree on both points. The US government has deemed US dollars to be the only thing that can be used to pay taxes, so therefore it has some root value.

On commodities, if there is strong demand for gold, uranium, corn, etc. the market can respond and invest more capital into creating them. Bitcoin - not so. No matter how much more capital is invested in mining, the rate of inflation is fixed, and the pie is just split differently. But there cannot be an influx of new Bitcoin above what is specified in the protocol.

[alwillis]

The US government has deemed US dollars to be the only thing that can be used to pay taxes, so therefore it has some root value.

This is incorrect. Just because we pay taxes in dollars doesn't give it any intrinsic value. It has been decreed by the US government that we do so but that doesn't change the underlying fact that the dollar is based on… nothing other than a promise of the government that it's useful.

Because more gold can be mined and more dollars can be printed, each block of gold and dollar loses value, because they're not scarce.

A dollar in 1913 had the same buying power as $26 in 2020 [1]. Bitcoin is hard money; it can't be deflated and it can't lose buying power like all fiat currencies do.

[1]: https://www.thebalance.com/what-is-the-value-of-a-dollar-tod...