[pureliquidhw]

Oil has utility. I can make plastics, fuel, or lubricants, and sell the refined product at a markup.

You can value oil by the value things that can be made with it against the cost to extract it.

Crypto does have an "extraction" cost, so that provides a baseline, but there's no downstream product to provide that value.

Crypto holders speculate that in the future they'll need crypto, but that isn't a given.

[legutierr]

> there's no downstream product to provide that value.

Not true. Ethereum and Solana, for example, provide shared-data and shared-compute services. Eth and Sol are used to pay for these services (and are the only means to pay for these services).

You may not value these services, but there are plenty of people who do, to the tune of anywhere from $10 to even hundreds of dollars per transaction, in the case of Ethereum.

[pureliquidhw]

That's basically replacing regular currency buying a service. The earlier comparison was to commodities and crypto's difficult to value nature.

I won't argue you can't buy goods and services with crypto. You certainly can't produce plastic without oil, but there's nothing that can be made with crypto. It's not a commodity. That's why it's a speculative asset that's hard to value. Sentiment means more to crypto values than downstream values.

In this particular example, if a competitor offered data sharing and shared compute services 100x cheaper than the eth network, I don't think eth value would go down anything close to 100x. If I found a way to turn air into plastic and gas, you can bet oil prices would plunge. If Musk said crypto is dead, prices would plummet.

[legutierr]

I believe you are mistaken. Shared-data and shared-compute services of the type provided by blockchain networks such as Ethereum can only be paid for by the native token of that network. There is not a known way to provide these services without users paying for them using the native token. Thus, if those services have value, then the tokens that must be purchased to pay for them must also have value.

In this way, native crypto tokens like Eth are similar to petroleum, in that their value is commensurate with the value of the work that can be performed by consuming them.

Sure, competition between networks can have an impact on price, just like competition from electric vehicles can impact the price of oil. But competition does not itself destroy value, even if it has an impact on demand, and therefore on price.

The article itself talks about the difference between value and price. The price of crypto might be inflated by the hype surrounding it, but that does not mean that is has no underlying value, as you seem to assert.

[pureliquidhw]

Did some high level research. Looks like the data sharing is of the Blockchain itself which when decentralized saves storage for nodes, but is a limited use case. Torrents do decentralized storage too.

The shared compute I saw was Golem, which is pretty neat actually. Not sure how you join the network without either sharing compute or buying into ETH with a traditional currency, bringing us back to square 1.

But as a speculative asset crypto is great! Many a mansion and Corvette have been bought with crypto gains while I'm on the sidelines wondering what the hell is going on, every yesterday being a great time to buy and every today seeming like tomorrow's the day I'd be left holding the bag.