[iamspoilt]

Okey, calling it a "long-term gamble" only sounds fair to me.

Talking about value, isn't blockchain / crypto analogous to a medium that enables moving money quickly? If yes, internet would be similar in some sense (we have instant local money transfers these days) but we don't have anything that tracks internet as an investment.

Coming back to it, I can rationalize myself investing in a money transfer business that is build on blockchain (think Transferwise that uses a mix of technology and banking agreements) and generates some revenue for me. But if that middleman can be removed, I cannot suddenly start considering that piece of technology, an investment.

[aboodman]

Any cryptocurrency can be used to move money quickly. So if you buy a cryptocurrency, you are automatically "investing" in that "business". You don't need Transferwise.

Bitcoin is the canonical example. The value investment argument for Bitcoin is that you think Bitcoin is (or will become) a good way to move money. You're buying a scarce piece of that utility.

===

Some cryptocurrencies additionally have other utilities. Example, ethereum can be used to write very slow, shitty software that runs on the blockchain. So far nobody has come up with a super amazing use case for this, but theoretically, if somebody did this would dramatically increase the demand for ethereum tokens - (b) above.

A better example would be something like https://handshake.org/ - a cryptocurrency that is trying to power a decentralized replacement for dns. Remains to be seen whether this can be done and will have adoption. These systems have all the problems of traditional startups, plus all the problems of low level protocol development, plus standardization problems, plus novel math.

However, I hope it's easy to see the value investment argument for something like handshake: dns is valuable, dns has problems, handshake is trying to solve those problems, by buying hns tokens I'm buying a part of this network, and if they succeed demand for those tokens goes up.

Hope this helps.

[iamspoilt]

Thanks for the input. It does put things into some perspective but I am still wondering.

So something analogous to owning a part of the network, would it be correct to say that, for instance, governments own and auction telecom spectrums to businesses. They do make money out of that ownership through the initial auction price and then potentially tax you later. So a cryptocurrency could be looked at in a similar way in the future. When you later sell the currency you have owned for a while (given that it takes off well over the couple of years), you are basically transferring that "spectrum" ownership to another party.

[aboodman]

That's right. Selling a piece of spectrum is a very good analogy.

Another easy analogy would be IP addresses. Early on in the internet huge chunks were just given out for free. Now they're valuable because they're scarce and the demand for them has skyrocketed as the internet grew.

You need spectrum to participate in the radio business (and other kinds of businesses). You need IP addresses to participate in the internet. Similarly you need HNS (as an example) to participate in the Handshake network.

And as with spectrum and IP addresses, there's only a fixed amount of HNS (or at least that is the expectation, the details vary in each cryptocurrency).

[iamspoilt]

But there is another factor for cryptocurrencies. Anyone can create a new network and do an ICO and as long as the protocol is sound and audited, the new network can still enable money transfers the same way as a Bitcoin network. The collection of networks can potentially never become as scarce as, for instance, IPV4 range or the radio spectrum for telephony in the earlier analogy that I mentioned.

[aboodman]

Anybody could create a new protocol that competes with IP (many did). So that part of your argument doesn't hold.

The reason that IP addresses are scarce is not because it's not possible to invent a new protocol, but because everyone else uses IP so only IP addresses are useful.

Spectrum might initially appear to be fundamentally scarce, but even then, people can invent other ways to communicate (and they did! copper wires! IP!).

These are all examples of networks - their value is proportional to their popularity. So yes, anybody can create a new cryptocurrency, but currencies are mainly valuable because of who you can use them with. Dollars are valuable because so many people accept them!

So if one cryptocurrency really gains traction, it will be hard for any other cryptocurrency to compete unless it offers something fundamentally new and different.

[pashamur]

Even domain names follow the same pattern - in the last decade there has been a huge number of new domain extensions that have been approved for use; if you go to namecheap these days you have hundreds of options for your personal site.

Yet the vast majority will still use .com, .net and .org, and those still remain the most valuable. :)

[didibus]

Think of it that way, payment processing is a valuable product, especially online. It's costly and challenging to take money from one person and send it to the other in a secure and trusted way. So companies come along to offer it as a service, like PayPal, Stripe, and you can think of CreditCard companies as well.

So you could imagine yourself investing in those correct?

Alright, now imagine I made an open source software that lets two people process a payment between each other? They can just install the software on their computer, and suddenly they can start transacting money with one another? For free! No need for PayPal or Visa anymore. So what's the catch?

The catch is that software can't actually move real physical money around, that requires trucks and truck drivers and safes, and all that. So it's not possible to move USD dollars with software alone.

What does PayPal do then?

PayPal enters into an agreement with your bank or credit card. When you send me 100$ through PayPal. PayPal and your bank agree that eventually 100$ will be moved from your bank to PayPal's bank account. That is done digitally, and both PayPal and your bank write that down in their system on their own ledger. Now PayPal assumes it will eventually have 100$, and it agrees with my bank to eventually deposit 97$ into my bank account. Similarly PayPal and my bank write that down.

Now eventually money will actually get moved physically, but it'll play catch up. You, me, PayPal, and our banks, we all trust each other, so we assume it will be moved for sure, and so even before that happens you might have sent me some item through the mail in exchange for that money.

Now back to my open source software alternative to PayPal. What if instead of this big dance, and eventual physical exchange of money. What if we made a currency that was fully digital? So when you processed a payment with my software, you arn't exchanging USD dollars, but something I shall call Bitcoin instead. That can easily be exchanged through software alone, no need to actually physically move anything.

Well, there's a few challenge to this. First, since the software is open source and we're each running it (no central service), how can we trust that you removed the amount you gave me from your account? And that I didn't add more than what you gave me to mine? That's where cryptography comes into play.

Okay, so now let's assume I figured out the tech, so my open source software can truly be used to exchange securely and without possible cheating some amount of a digital currency between two parties without any central coordinator. Now we have the problem of how do you get some of that currency in the first place before you can exchange it?

Well, my software also guarantees that there's only 1 million coins of it max. And as the author, I gave myself 100k coins. And I randomly distributed the rest amongst the first thousand users.

Now you were a lucky one, and you have 100 coin if it. So again, maybe I want to buy something from you, but you're in another country. So I tell you, I'll give you 100 of my crypto coin, exchanged through my open source software, and you'll send me by mail my item I buy from you.

Perfect, now we have a way to exchange a currency without having to physically move anything, it is fully handled by software and can be exchanged over the internet only.

So maybe you say, well what can you buy with my coins? Well, you started selling goods in exchange for them? And so did others. So maybe Joe Blo sells Video Games and accepts my coin in exchange for them. And you sell plants. So now you can use my coins to buy video games from Joe and he can use them to buy plants from you. And so on. So the coins are slowly starting to be worth real assets, as more and more people start to accept them in exchange for goods and services they'll be worth more and more.

What's cool about a fully digital currency is that exchanging it is super fast, easy and cheap. It's just really convenient. You might also believe it to be more trust worthy then the agreement between PayPal and our banks, if you think the tech is harder to cheat. And you might believe the software is more stable than some government backed currency at managing inflation. So you might actually find that my software and my currency is overall more convenient, more secure, more safe, and more stable as a currency to exchange and trade in, so maybe you just fully move to it and stop accepting USD in exchange for plants.

Now back to investment. Say you thought that this piece of software was amazing, and you believe that people will slowly stop using other payment processors in favour for it. Well, sell your stock in PayPal cause eventually everyone will move to using my software instead. Now you want a piece of that pie, but I don't sell stock, and I don't sell my software for money, it's free and open source. Except there'd still a way for you to profit from my software gaining in popularity. If you find a way to acquire some of its digital coins, for less than what people will be willing to exchange for them in the future, you can profit from it. Thus it becomes an investment vehicle.

Sorry for the length, hope that explains it though.