Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 434. (Read 2032286 times)

Mycelium now working with Trezor.  Dynamite combo.

or, as someone on reddit put it more boldly:

nothing is fucking intrinsically valuable.

in yet other words: "the eval() function is context-sensitive"

Soon is all relative.

Soon?

that's probably not a bad idea. 

the term "intrinsic" has been abused quite markedly in the whole Bitcoin vs gold debate, especially when describing gold.  it reflects both a laziness in the use of the language or just sheer inability to understand the multiple facets and intricacies of gold valuation and how they compare to something even more complex, ie, Bitcoin.

The Only TV News Report On The Economy You'll Ever Need

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HN2iVe8_Ato
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-04-04/only-tv-news-report-economy-youll-ever-need

NUMBERS

again ? :-)

in years past, we've had monster ramps during Easter weekend.  everyone sitting home with nothing to do except trade bits.

I don't think so we now have the long Easter weekend, when it is expected and and quite obvious to see no price movement at all. I think that more than 70% of BTC trade is in China right now. They don't have an Easter there, so it is just as I expect bitcoin is brice is stagnant.

pack your bags.  we're going up.

To further elucidate the points made in the video, nominalization (a.k.a. reification, or what Mises called hypostatization, the tendency toward which he named "the worst enemy of clear thinking") is when you convert an abstract concept or action/process into a noun, and then end up treating that noun as a sort of "thing in itself" and allow it take on some properties of a physical object. As a loose figure of speech it is innocent enough, but - as is always the case - when we try to take loose phrasing from everyday talk into more rigorous contexts without cleaning it up, the result is mass confusion leading to all sorts of fallacious reasoning. As the speaker said, politicians love to make use of this confusion.

Another way to talk about this is to call any conversion of an abstract concept or action/process into a noun "nominalization," since that what it literally is, but then to call the fallacious taking-seriously of this "reification" or "hypostatization." My preferred term is reification to refer to the error.

Some classic nominalizations and corresponding reifications:



As may be evident from the examples, when you start off with a loose nominalization (using nouns because they're convenient in English) you can end up committing the fallacy of reification. How exactly does the slip happen? There is actually another semantic error at work here: equivocation, where a word is used in two different meanings at the speaker's convenience, or inadvertently.

In other words, what happens in each case is that the noun form of the word being the same as the verb form makes it especially easy to switch back and forth between them, and pretty soon the people forget that the noun they are talking about is not an entity, but actually some process that itself involves physical objects or entities: water molecules that wave, people that value gold bars, mileposts that are spaced out. It's incoherent to speak of a wave without something doing the waving, or to speak of gold having value without someone doing the valuing, or to speak of space curving if we are maintaining that space=nothingness. It becomes an implied equivocation because the meaning of "wave," "value," and "space" has subtly been allowed to change in the course of the argument. Whereas we started off taking it as obvious that some objects were waving, some people were valuing something, and some objects were spaced, we ended up silently shifting the meaning to exclude those objects and people.

Now the term "intrinsic value" might have been useful if not for this reification trap. We could use it to refer to the direct use value people place on something, as opposed to its exchange value in the market, as even Mises himself did. Unfortunately, all experience hath shewn that the word intrinsic overwhelmingly tends to lead people into the reification error described above, because this is a basic human tendency baked into the social pressure of language (things that "sound right" tend to carry a weight that feels like social authority). Intrinsic sounds like "in and of itself," with no reference to a valuator. This tendency makes using this word just asking for trouble. It invites misunderstanding time and again.

To be clearer, then, I strongly recommend avoiding the term "intrinsic value" and instead using "direct use value" or similar to distinguish from exchange value.

To be able to distinguish intrinsic value from exchange value is essential in understanding money and essential for understanding why bitcoin is good money. It is the basis for discussing Aristoteles' definition of money, Mises' regression theorem and gold. Without a clear understanding of these simple concepts, the discussion degenerates into gibberish.

I don't care if Warren Buffet does not understand it. That only shows that you can be a successful business man without that specific knowledge. But in this thread, which is the center of bitcoin knowledge, it should be the basis for discussion.

No. The word intrinsic means in itself, and it is perfectly proper to use. It is not conflicting with subjective.

Subjective allows for different values to be assigned by different individuals, which is important for the freedom, as in free market. Subjective is also a good word. But since all value is subjective, it is not useful for distinguishing between money and other things.

The intrinsic concept is important for understanding the difference between money and other valuable things. You can use other words, for instance value for direct use, but the word intrinsic is good and I protest the theft and destruction of that word.

Good vid thanks. Feel like I could have wrote much of that myself! but Worth has lucidly expounded and expanded on it thoroughly ... and it is a much needed topic that people need to learn about, kudos.

Edit: here's another great, clear vid re: What is Bitcoin wonder if these have made it on top r/Bitcoin yet?

while we did have previous digital monies using transaction hashchains and data trees, we never had one that linked a chain of "blocks" together whose purpose was to perform transaction ordering and clearing via a timestamping mechanism.  and it's more than just a chain of crytographically connected blocks; it is a summation of POW target hashes each of whose security gains the deeper it is buried into the chain.  i once likened it to the individual floors of a skyscraper built from the ground up.  you only get a brief chance to significantly modify the floor you're working on before it gets buried beneath all the other upwardly ascending later floors that make any subsequent modification of lower floors impossible.  and the builders of the floors of this skyscraper come from all over the world, like they do in Dubai. alot of them die on the way up to building the 163rd floor.  

except this skyscraper is going to the Moon.

Absolutely true. Value is a "nominalization" to borrow a term from NLP: http://youtu.be/1sceRsmT1yc

 ^ This

"If people value something, it has value; if people do not value some­thing, it does not have value; and there is no intrinsic about it."

Value, as a concept, is inherently subjective.

Therefore the "intrinsic" adjective is redundant so should be just dropped for correctness once you grok the value=subjective bit. Intrinsic value is a sloppy term, historically used to describe the objective physical properties, e.g. conductivity, malleability, corrosion-resistance of gold, silver, lead. The intrinsic properties of objects can be valued, but the existence of the properties themselves is an objective reality that can not be extended to the human values placed upon them.

Cheezus. How is it possible to turn straightforward things into nonsense.

Intrinsic value is the use value of the thing itself. Everyone has his or her opinion of what is more valueable, that thing or another thing. It is intrinsically valuable to you if you want the thing itself. If you want money to buy a nice vacation, the moneys value is not the money itself, rather the vacation you can buy for it. So money has no value to you in itself, no intrinsic value, but it has exchange value, because you can exchange it for something of intrinsic value.

You could make the argument that intrinsic value does not exist for any good or service except its price which is a reflection of its demand and supply position and not of any inherent quality. This is the same for gold, houses, paper money and Bitcoin. All these things have no value in and of itself.