[throwaway413]

Oh totally agree - someone can just pull a necklace right off you. I was just surfacing the point that at least gold does has some value on its own as a status symbol - there is a market for jewelry outside of gold as a transfer protocol. An bitcoin wallet without ability to transfer it is just some used up memory, it doesn’t have any value on its own. See coins going to 0 when exchanges close their doors. All the banks in the world could close and people would still find shiny rocks attractive and admirable. We have for thousands of years.

[bckr]

> someone can just pull a necklace right off you

I wonder if there's an argument to be made that nothing is of any real value unless there's also some risk of losing it.

e.g. you drop your apple in a gutter, or someone takes it from you, or it turns out to have a nice fat worm inside it

[dredmorbius]

nothing is of any real value unless there's also some risk of losing it.

If you're looking for a commodity to have trade or exchange value, then it must be tradeable or exchangeable. That's the notion of "inalienable" as used in the US Declaration of Independence: rights which cannot be alienated (separated) from the individual posessing them. Life, liberty, happiness being the three used in that document.

This doesn't mean undeniable, and there might be some value which can be extracted through threats of denial: "your money or your life".

And there are aspects of value which can be exchanged though the good itself doesn't move: title, copyright, and patent rights might be three such of these. If I transer you land title, the land itself doesn't move, but the claim to usefruct from it does.

A hypothetically nontransferable, non-appropriable technical asset is still subject to claims if a superior right or denial of access to that asset may still be claimed.

And in general, a currency which is used to facilitate trade should in general be portable, readily recognisable, divisible, durable, and homogeneous, all attributes William Stanley Jevons proposed in 1875:

https://archive.org/details/moneyexchange00jevorich/page/30/...

(He also claimed money required intrinsic value, which appears to be an error. Rather, intrinsic value exchanges for trust within the financial system.)

That said, an interesting suggestion.

[throwaway413]

I like that. Risk of losing it, and difficulty of recovery of the same or an equal asset.

Life, for example, is extremely valuable. Everyone loses it, but there’s no getting it back. If you lose the apple, you can probably get another relatively easily, unless we’re talking a post-apocalypse situation…

[aaaaaaaaata]

As long as people are willing to take cryptocurrency, people will be willing to steal, or work for, cryptocurrency.