[randrews]

A store of value allows you to get the value back out: if I spend a bunch of money and effort mining iron ore, or growing wheat, or building a house, I have the ore or wheat or house which has intrinsic value. Maybe now I don't need to grow as much wheat next year.

Bitcoins take value to create, and creating it consumes that energy / compute, but all you get out of it is a receipt that proves you spent the resources. You can't use the bitcoin for anything; you can only sell it to someone else who thinks it's a store of value.

[yucky]

I think you may be conflating commodities (and real estate) with the concept of "store of value". Those can be stores of value as well, of course. But using your explanation, doesn't it also take resources to create baseball cards, art, books etc., yet we accept they can be a store of value.

And with most stores of value, there is no guarantee you will get out more or equal to what you put in.

[randrews]

> doesn't it also take resources to create baseball cards, art, books etc.

Baseball cards are generally valued more than an equivalent-size rectangle of cardstock. Books are priced higher than a ream of paper; saying the value of a piece of art comes from its frame is usually an insult.

I would argue that those things are also not in any way a store of value: the only thing you can do with them is sell them to someone else. If no one else wants them, they're worthless. By your logic a big pile of beanie babies is a store of value, since someone spent a lot of money in the 90s to get them, and they took cloth and plastic pellets to make.

The way I've usually heard it explained is that doing some sort of productive work (growing wheat, clearing land, mining things, whatever) can store the value of that work because you create something useful with it. The resources it took to grow the wheat are stored in the wheat, and can be retrieved by not having to grow wheat next year.

My point, whether we agree on the terminology or not, is that Bitcoins are not anything useful: they take massive amounts of resources to create, just like farming or mining, but all you get out is a proof-of-work receipt that says "yes, he lit that pile of money on fire to create this."

[yucky]

>Baseball cards are generally valued more than an equivalent-size rectangle of cardstock. Books are priced higher than a ream of paper; saying the value of a piece of art comes from its frame is usually an insult.

Not necessarily. There is more use for blank card stock than card stock damaged by some obscure overprinted card from the 1990's. You can't use it for anything, it's been "consumed" with the design. Same goes for shitty overprinted books or "art". An artist will pay for blank canvas, but not a painting my niece did of dogs playing poker.

So it goes back to the idea that a store of value is anything people agree stores value.

[randrews]

I think we're arguing over terminology. But "it takes resources to create" is not the same thing as "it stores those resources." That's the whole misconception with Bitcoin. It takes a lot of resources to make one and that value is lost forever, instead of being used on something productive.