[mrtksn]

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.

[timdaub]

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?

[mrtksn]

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.

[timdaub]

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.

[timdaub]

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.