Of course bitcoin doesn't have government backing. That was my point. There is no backstop, or basis for valuation in relation to other currencies other than whim. So we know it cannot really act as a currency. Not really. As for the rest of it as an asset class and your work comparisons, I think they are false comparisons. Agriculture produces real output that people consume, therefore the need for this work is obvious. Same with other commodities. Stocks, we don't need to discuss. Gold, since you mentioned it, has aesthetic value and industrial application, as well as a very long history as a store of value. Whatever you may think of gold, I'm pretty sure it will outlast bitcoin. The work you refer to in the production of bitcoin sounds like puffery to me. And this at some cost to the environment. So what? And to "keep the network running and staying secure?" So what - that should be a given. It just sounds like an arbitrary attempt at legitimate valuation. Run around the track 3 times, and I will give you a special thumbtack. Keep doing it, and you will get more thumbtacks. They are a store of value, don't you know. You can trade them with friends. Baron, I understand why you're trading in bitcoin. And, really, good for you that you're ahead of the game! But I cannot believe that you bought into the premise. By your account, I guess I’m just to stupid.
Nothing matters. Bitcoins technology is that the number(price) goes up. Tether is printing $1B every day, but i am sure this has nothing to do with price going up.
There is a government that recognized bitcoin as a currency. https://insights.som.yale.edu/insig...or took a different,Bitcoin as a legal tender. Work does not necessarily create value. What gives bitcoin value is people believing it has value. If people decide it no longer has value, then it will have none.
Have you ever thought about the flip side of using something as a store of value that has no other purpose other than being the best ledger in the world? If you arrive at the correct realization that money is just a ledger to keep track of value, then the fact that its useless at doing anything else means that it will be the best at doing just one thing. Look at real estate. Its great as a form of shelter, but everyone uses it now as a bank account and a trading vehicle. This dilutes its shelter properties. If you took the financial premium away from real estate, houses would be much better at being just houses. The need for bitcoin to do things outside of exchanging value is where lots of people have difficulty. The property that physical cash has is that its useless outside of exchanging value. Nobody uses cash as a piece of paper to draw on. Nobody shreds it up to use as insulation (well, until it gets so devalued), or uses it as toilet paper. The cash in your wallet you only use as a form of exchange to buy something else. If you could roll up a dollar bill and smoke it to get high, this would distort the money property of cash. To the only good thing to say about fiat is that the physical bills in your wallet do an excellent job of exchanging value, even though that value is constantly diminishing. I think its pivotal that bitcoin has zero use outside of being a ledger.
These puzzles, do they have real life applications? Or are these puzzles empty type puzzles like Sudoku where you guess numbers to arrive at a destination totally irrelevent to life. I remember as a kid being in Scouts, working hard to earn a worthless badge on my sleeve. But as a kid, the badge meant everything - to my ego. As an adult, I then threw all that shit in the bin. The thing with bitcoin though, it does have monetary value, it can be exchanged back for cash.
The value of Bitcoin, and the reason why the work behind it matters, is because it has become the premiere place to store your excess cash. Becoming the superior storehouse for your money IS THE PRODUCT. It doesn't need to be consumed like an apple or used like gold for some industrial purpose in order to serve it's purpose. In other words, the primary purpose is that it's the ulitmate savings account, or in more practical terms, the safest and most interest-bearing vault to put your excess resources into.
It's not the nature of the puzzle that matters. What matters is the reward you get for solving it. The harder the puzzle, the greater the reward. Providing any product you can imagine at your fingertips with free overnight or next-day shipping sounds like an impossible puzzle to solve, but Amazon did it, hence the rewards to Jeff Bezos and the shareholders.