[galaxyLogic]

There's a big difference. Everybody may believe that you own your house. And everybody may believe you own 100 bitcoins. At issue is what is the exchange rate between bitcoins and say US dollars. If that goes to zero then you've lost the value of your bitcoins. You have not lost the ownership of your bitcoins, they have lost their value.

Whereas for your house, no matter what its market value would be you still have the right to live there and prevent others from doing so.

[DoughnutHole]

That is entirely still a societal norm and a statement of personal belief about specific rights. You might believe those rights to be inalienable and that your property is necessarily yours, but that doesn't actually translate to to a guarantee of maintaining that possession in the absence of the institutions that currently protect that ownership.

Anyone who's lived through a massive societal upheaval, collectivisation, dictatorship etc can attest to this - your ownership of property only means anything in as much as it's protected. If the state fails, or if society's understanding of private property radically changes then your investment is only valuable if you can hold on to it.

Even in the private-property loving West the value of an individuals property can often turn out to just be the amount that the state decides to pay them when they seize it via eminent domain.

[galaxyLogic]

All true but still I think there is a clear difference. Assets can and are traded in exchanges. Their value goes up and down based on what is the "shared belief" of their expected value. Laws are not traded. They can change but do so many orders of magnitudes less frequently than the value of assets on the market. Laws are not beliefs they are societal contracts.

[zikzikzik]

> Laws are not beliefs they are societal contracts.

Societal contracts are just collective beliefs. When the number of people upholding a particular societal contract goes to zero it ceases to exist. Just as any other belief, it requires believers to exist. Unlike, for example, the space rock that some group of sentient organisms decided to call Mars.

[galaxyLogic]

it is not about "believing a societal contract". It is about believing that other people follow it or not. Contract is not a belief.

[smaryjerry]

Pretty sure when Detroit went bankrupt they were basically paying people to come back to the city. There are ghost towns for a reason, because homes do lose value, even for the person who can still live there. Bitcoin right now is in the middle of nowhere like these ghost towns that can fail if the one company supporting them fails or the farmers just give up. It’s becoming a bigger city, to continue the analogy, but is still in the gold rush phase, where all the miners have come out looking for something. Maybe the city becomes San franscisco or maybe we find a ghost town in 100 years once everyone realizes the gold ran out.

[galaxyLogic]

I'm a crypto-sceptic myself. Crypto is a currency. The value of most currencies goes up and down based on the expected production/export capabilities of countries supporting their currency. But crypto is not associated with any country, so there is no country whose economic output could make crypto stronger or weaker. Perhaps this is a naive viewpoint but I think best way to look at crypto is as a currency and think what makes some currencies strong and some weak.

[kuramitropolis]

Rights are constructs, let's talk capabilities.

If the value of _dollars_ goes to zero, the house doesn't collapse. The social consensus and enforcement mechanism that protects your right to live there probably does though