[fny]

Gold does not have inherent value either. It's price is determined purely by a market and there are no other pricing mechanisms.

You can't use discounted cash flow. You can't use comparables. You can use raw materials. It's a straight up rock that people price.

[XorNot]

It's still an actual rock though.

Cryptocurrency is less then that. Cryptocurrency is expended energy. You can't use a cryptohash for anything. Whereas I can melt down gold and make earings with it.

[symlinkk]

What a bizarre opinion to have on an IT website. “Software is worthless, it’s just expended energy, you can’t use it for anything, whereas I can melt down gold and make earrings with it”

[XorNot]

Bitcoin is not software though.

Bitcoin is a computation carried out by software.

Think of it this way: if you turned off all the Bitcoin nodes tomorrow, and then later on a bunch of people said "hey, cryptocurrency would solve this issue for us!" - is there any reason for them to try and bring back old Bitcoin wallets in order to deploy it? No - none. They just fork the Bitcoin codebase, rename a few things and start a new network.

Bitcoin the software implementation which is already free is valuable. Specific wallets, bitcoins etc? Not at all, and not reusable.

[broighbrobroigh]

A failure of imagination to do something useful with crystalized math is more a commentary on the failure of imagination vs. the utility of math.

If you compare any esoteric financial instrument against the melted rock utility test that you mention, the laity will err on the side of melted rocks.

[jerf]

"A failure of imagination to do something useful with crystalized math"

I don't think I could possibly describe BitCoin as "crystallized math". It's not like it is somehow convertible into some useful solution to some other math problem. It's a solution to a math problem that is essentially designed to not be useful for anything else on the grounds that said "utility" would be a potential mechanism for cracking the hash algorithm. (e.g., if you built a "hash function" that also provided a solution to some isomorphic bin packing problem, your hash function would have the weakness that the correspondence would reveal a lot a lot of theoretical bits about what was hashed.)

Besides, even if it is "crystallized math" than said math is independent of BitCoin's utility itself. If it were that useful you could go compute hashes until they have large numbers of zeros on the front all by yourself, without having to be involved with BitCoin. Since nobody has any conceivable use for such a thing as evidenced by the complete failure to do so, I have no idea what you think you're saying here. Merely working really hard at some computation does not make that computation useful for any other purpose.

[abriosi]

I read crystallized meth every time

[lanstin]

Only in the same sense that nothing has inherent value. Gold is pretty and durable and people like it. That gives it value in the system of exchanging stuff amongst humans.

[twic]

Wheat has value because you can eat it. Dollars have value because you can pay your taxes in them.

Gold does have craft and industrial uses, but not enough to explain its value.

[SavantIdiot]

Well, gold is a better conductor in electronic circuits than bitcoin, so it has SOME intrinsic value. ;-)

[imtringued]

I can buy overly expensive shiny rings made out of gold. The utility is purely cosmetic but it exists.

The worst thing that could happen to your gold is that it gets turned into jewelry at a fraction of its original purchasing price.