[rvense]

> Bitcoin's enegery:market-cap ratio - a proxy for energy vs. value to humans - is >300x better than an airline & 60x better than JP Morgan & 20x better than google's.

Market cap is not, to me, any kind proxy for "value to humans". The utility of Bitcoin as an alternative to fiat is obviously unrelated to the number coins or their price.

[elevenoh]

So say this while offering zero other alternative.

How else would you place a value on a company or product's explicit worth to humans?

[rvense]

I can't give you one formula for that. It depends which kind of product, since most things are more than just investment objects.

What is the value of money, viewed as a technology that facilitates the everyday exchanged of goods and services? My only answer to that is "incalculable", since I can't really imagine society without some variation of it. The value of that concept does not reduce to a number.

If we then move on to the discussion of different forms of money, say cash versus digital, or bank deposits versus cryptocurrencies, then I honestly don't see how "number of units times trading price" is any measure of the relative usefulness or value of each of those as technologies. It might be an answer to something, but not that question.

Actually, now that you've made me think about it, I might concede that market cap is useful measure of something's value as an investment object. But the value (rather, usefulness) of a currency is more than that. My salary is not an investment, it's a way of storing the value of my labour and convert it into the stuff I need to survive. So to me, that discussion needs to cover things like efficiency, resilience, and politics (e.g., who controls it). And to me, Bitcoin is very far from a winner in any of those.