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The idea behind it is that it is useful beyond the accounting.

Gold has a very little intrinsic value. Decorative and tool making value due to its physical properties are there but they are minor comparatively.

BTC has none. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a value, of course but it’s simply a value within a certain ecosystem.

OK but then considering your definition, I'd disagree. Bitcoin but more importantly general purpose blockchains (e.g. ETH) give rise to digital economies where real people can participate and earn money through work. Since 2019, I've now - for multiple months - been able to make an income by coding for various DAOs. Surely, BTC/ETH was used for accounting. But the social structures that formed and enabled me to have an income I can pay my rent with are of value to me and only existed because of the blockchain's technological capabilities (e.g. smart contracts). Ergo, there's intrinsic value beyond accounting.

hutzlibu 1830 days ago

"Gold has a very little intrinsic value. "

Not really true, the only reason it is not used much more widely in electronic components, despite being superior to copper, is the high price it has, because of its function as value storage.

xxs 1830 days ago

Gold is not superior to copper for everything - incl. the most important one feature: conductivity. Gold (22.14 nΩ⋅m) is, of course, a lot less chemically active which makes it ideal for terminals, contacts, etc. (and mostly as plating agent), however as a sole conductor it's worse than copper (16.78 nΩ⋅m). Gold has worse thermal conductivity as well... and it's a lot heavier.

That being said, it's still a very valuable material for electronics.

hutzlibu 1830 days ago

Thx, for some reasons I believed it was also superior in conductivity.

lagadu 1830 days ago

One of the most important features gold has is its ductility: it can be made into extremely thin, unbroken wires.

Gold is simply one of the metals in the universe and has different strength and weaknesses depending on the application.

It's not true that gold is naturally superior, in fact Gold is often mixed with other metals to create alloys to overcome certain issues. Pure gold is too soft for most of the practical uses like jewellery for example, so they add copper to it.

> What exactly is the assumption that deems BTC's intrinsic value zero and land's value more than zero?

For me the easiest way to determine if something has intrinsic value is ask yourself what would happen if you owned all of it (and couldn't be forced to give it up).

If you owned all the Bitcoin in the world, we wouldn't accept its use, and would just create another currency with identical properties.

If you owned all the land in the world, people would come to you to buy or rent it. You can't build a house or a factory unless someone is willing to sell or lease you the land. That's what makes it valuable.

In many ways, this is why we have the word "priceless". Things become priceless when, in certain contexts (for certain people at certain times), they will not be sold for any price. Land can be priceless because I can have a sentimental attachment to a particular place. Its value isn't derived from how many $'s people will pay for it.

atweiden 1830 days ago

> If you owned all the Bitcoin in the world, the world wouldn't accept its use, and would just create another currency with identical properties.

Don’t all modern currencies work like this?

Yes, they do. It's literally the definition of fiat money that it has no intrinsic value.

That's a rather theoretical argument. If you were the sole owner of the world's land, then people would probably resort to kill or capture you to redistribute the land.

It's a thought experiment. Imagine you're trying to prove the relationship between your personal savings rate, and the date at which you can retire.

- If I save 100% of my money now, I can retire now (because clearly I don't need money to live).

- If I save 0% of my money now, I will never be able to retire (because I'll have none when I forfeit my income).

Again, I think this is a rather theorerical argument.

Retirement is not solely coupled to the amount of money you have. I personally have aspirations and enough money to not having to work for a few years. And still I work lots of hours to achieve certain goals that have nothing to do with increasing my money.

Perhaps financial independence is a better term. Retirement depends on FI, but FI doesn't necessarily mean retirement.

FI is solely determined by the amount of valuable assets you have

whiskyant 1830 days ago

If one person owned all the land in the world, we also wouldn't accept it.

lottin 1830 days ago

The point is that the process of bitcoin adoption is in fact a massive huge wealth-redistribution mechanism between adopters. Making people extraordinarily rich just because they were the first to buy a new currency and other people extraordinarily poor just because they were the last isn't probably something most people would agree with.

pinkybanana 1830 days ago

> just because they were the last isn't probably something most people would agree with.

Most people also don't agree on huge salaries and bonuses for CEO's, in practice the people with money are willing to pay those perks. When people vote with their wallets, does it really matter what the people not voting are going to say?

lottin 1830 days ago

It certainly matters if you don't want to live in fear for the rest of your life. Because if you think for a minute that the level of violence that would ensue would not be monumental you're kidding yourself.

incrudible 1829 days ago

I think you are kidding yourself. Throughout history, cleptocracy has been the norm. Uprisings, especially successful ones, have been the exception.

The "you have nothing to lose but your chains"-argument just doesn't work on people who have more than enough junk to fill their stomachs (and brains) with.

echelon 1830 days ago

CEOs, at least, tend to work at companies that add value to the world. Usually.

Bitcoin adds anonymous violence, increased CO2 emissions, and subtracts brilliant minds that could be working on more important problems.

solotronics 1830 days ago

Land ownership is a totally abstract idea anyways it's just been a thing for longer.

Ownership is abstract, there are communities where the concept is rejected but the land has intrinsic value regardless of the claims of those who use it.

Capitalist, Communist or Anarchist - the land doesn’t care, it grows the tomatoes the same way.

Surely if you look via godmode on earth, you can even ascribe intrinsic value to it in the case of complet societal collapse where there's only tribes fighting for tomatoes. But is that a useful view?

Coins in WoW have a value, anything can have a value. The problem is that these are in abstractions many levels over the biological processes that the life is based on.

The core of the human life is based on people processing materials to sustain biological processes and the rest of the humanity is built on top of it.

Intrinsic value comes from the ability to support that structure. At the top of the structure there are the higher ideals, like art and happiness and people who produce these are often rewarded with the goods from the bottom of the pyramid.

The problem with the BTC's "early adopters get rewarded extremely well and are entitled to all the goods for a liftime and generations to come" nature makes an extremely top heavy structure.

If that becomes a reality I suspect that a rubber hose cryptography breakthrough event will occur. After all, whoever has the private key, has the coins and the private key is transferable by force.

Re: Intrinsic value:

I'm annoyed that the intrinsic value argument is constantly being brought up even by economists against crypto currencies. I have a similar understanding of the concept as you have, in that the value derives from the material eventually - land being most valuable.

However, what many that say BTC has no intrinsic value neglect is the opportunistic value of the traditional banking sector. German Wirecard e.g. went broke and now its stock is worth nothing anymore. Seems there was no intrinsic value either except for a few office chairs I guess.

Nobody warned investors of that. But for Bitcoin, where corruption is less likely given its transparent structure, people keep talking about intrinsic value and how it apparently has none.

Fair enough. I think it's also worth considering that in terms of technological progress, BTC has been rather shit such that this thesis of "earlier adopters" becoming the new overlords is a quite speculative argument.

Sure, in this hype cycle Bitcoin has once again had a huge inflow of capital. But if you look at Bitcoin dominance charts, you can see that it is at an all-time low, and IMO will continue to be if its community stays so conservative.

mcosta 1830 days ago

That is why mankind has waged war for millennia

JumpCrisscross 1830 days ago

> That is why mankind has waged war for millennia

Societies with no concept of private land ownership wage war. Nomadic tribes with no private or even communal land ownership structures wage war at the scales they can. Tying warmongering to private ownership or money is oversimplifying.

vincnetas 1830 days ago

I think about this through basic needs of human being. Food and shelter. Can i use land to get some of my basic needs if there is nothing else around? Probably yes. Can i use bitcoin for that. Not likely.