[drdeca]

ok, but when you are sending money via visa or paypal or what have you, you aren't sending shares of stock in that company, you are sending something denominated in dollars.

The theory around "prices people are willing to pay for ease of transactions" seems probably not that tricky,

the theory around "the value people will assign to a good based on ease of transfer of that good" seems like it would be more complicated and confusing.

[fastball]

I think you're overcontemplating it. Sure, the means of transaction and the network responsible for the transaction are one in the same, but how does that fundamentally change the equation? If anything it makes cryptos more valuable, not less, because you only need the single token and you can do both (have a share in the network and transact on the network).

[drdeca]

I’m just saying the theory of how to price it is quite different!

The value of a PayPal share is tied to the expected future profit of PayPal, to how much transaction fees will be total, and how much costs will be.

This is a distinct question from the value that a user assigns to the ability to make transactions using PayPal, which, I suppose corresponds to the demand curve of how many transactions/ how much is transacted, given different transaction fee sizes.

Of course, an analogous demand curve should also apply to bitcoin (or what have you).

But this demand curve doesn’t seem enough to give an explanation for what price to expect. (Not just “it doesn’t explain the actual price” but rather, I don’t see how it by itself would explain any price.)