Actually the mining cost of the whole network is what backs bitcoin's value. Since digital currency is not backed by any government or physical assets, the only thing that can baseline its value is the cost, no cost = no value. I can not think of anything that has value without a cost
Of course the cost means the lowest possible cost, which is already very energy efficient today. If you do those hashes using CPU you will cost millions of times more electricity
water... water has value and is free.. depending on where you live of course.. are you charged to breath the air you breath? what value would you put on the air you breath? if suddenly there was a 10k dollar valuation put on the air you breath and you knew you wouldnt get the air if you didnt pay would you pay it if you had the money? what if it was 100k.. would you pay if you had the money? 1 million if you had the money? but it cost nothing to produce of course you wouldnt right? you would rather die than pay money for something that cost nothing to produce right?
does the air we breath have a cost to produce? no.. obviously if we keep using up natural resources it could incur a cost to produce in the future.. but as it stands it costs nothing to produce, yet is probably the most valuable thing on the planet. bare in mind value and price are not the same. if governments thought they had half a chance of charging for the air we breath dont you think they would.. havnt most govs privatised water and started charging everyone for that?
if something has a lot of value.. people will pay for it.. UNLESS.. there is an "unlimited"(enough to go around for a very long time) supply.
proof of stake currencies are a perfect example staring you straight in the face. currently how many proof of stake coins in the top twenty cost ZERO in resources to produce and run(excluding living expenses of the dev)? and do these coins that cost nothing to produce and run have value? yes because they have value, there is NOT an unlimited supply and therefore people are willing to pay for them. saying currencies need a cost to produce in order to have value is completely false.
in short.. " no cost = no value" is totally incorrect.
Water or air, if you can get for free, then it has no value, you mixed utility with value. Value is only decided by supply and demand. Of course you can artificially limit the supply and lift its price for a while, but that will never last long, since the competitors with low cost supply will quickly bring down the price
This is the same for POS coin, if a low-cost-coin can command a high value, there will be many people creating such low-cost-coins to join the competition, thus the value will be quickly brought down later. However, if high-cost-coin have high value, no one will join the competition without carefully calculate their risk first
so you are saying water and air are not valuable because they are free? they are probably the most valuable resources on the planet.. why else would ex pres.bush and his daughter go and buy up thousands of hectares of land that sits over some of the largest water aquifers in the world? because the water below the land is valuable. the water is free to all those people who live off of the water that flows from the aquifer but still someone pays millions to acquire this water that required zero input to produce and apparently doesnt have any value according to your argument. why is this so? because water is a VALUABLE resource. something doesnt have to have a price to be valuable.. if you collect rain water to cut down on mains usage then(if you pay water bills) that rain is VALUABLE to you.. it is as valuable as the amount of money it saves you + the value of lowering demand on mains produced water.
you need to understand that something does not need to have a price to be valuable. do you value your life? if you do then it has value. i would guess that your family value your life too. you dont value your life based on how much it has cost you and your parents to raise you do you? so your life has value regardless of how much your life has cost you or your family, or in other words, the cost of production of you up until now does not even remotely come in to the equation of how much your life is worth.. you wouldnt even think about that. so yes something can have value regardless whether it is free or whether it has a cost to produce.
now.. the same can be applied to proof of stake coins.. say for instance bitcoin never existed.. say a PoS coin was the first coin and only coin ever to be created, first to market, the big dog and only dog of crypto.. imagine all the services that are in place for bitcoin are in place for this imaginary coin. joe with his big well payed job now has the ability to send his poor old mother sally home thousands every month to pay medical bills for his sick old pa joe senior. joe sends the money home using coin "x"(imaginary pos coin) because coin x does not charge even close to the same fees as western union and it gets there in a fraction of the time. now imagine it is also used for every other purpose that bitcoin is used for now and then include other services like an asset exchange.
does coin x have a value in this situation? i would say most certainly it does.. regardless of how much it costs to produce or run.
now.. imagine that 1000 new coins pop up that do the exact same thing essentially with a handful of changes.. a couple people use it, but nothing in comparison.. these other coins will have value, but nothing close to coin x. and most likely they wont ever have a value high enough to challenge coin x. (thats what we see with all the shitty bitcoin clones and the ones with minor changes.)
then a new coin y pops up(also a PoS coin).. and its the god damn swiss knife of crypto.. companies ipo on its asset exchange and a few years down the line wall street are trading on it doing billions of dollars in trade on its asset exchange per day. not just that but it has allowed people to anonymously invest in companies no matter what country the company is in and no matter what country the trader is in. its faster cheaper more economically friendly and just better so every joe sending money home decides to use coin y because its cheaper and faster and better for the environment.
does coin y have value in this situation? would you say it has more value than coin x because of its added advantages? i would say yes. it most certainly does. does the cost of production play any part in the value of the coin? its quite obvious that it doesnt. if coin x cost 10 times more to produce than coin y.. but yet every one wanted to use coin y... would coin x be worth 10 times more? no.. it would probably be worth 10 times less by the time everyone has swapped over to coin y. why is this some might ask? its because coins get their value(and therefore price once it corrects to near the true value) from the utility they provide.
saying that something needs a cost to produce to have any value is ridiculous.
"if a low-cost-coin can command a high value, there will be many people creating such low-cost-coins to join the competition, thus the value will be quickly brought down later,
no one will join the competition without carefully calculate their risk first"
the only people that think about the cost of production before switching to another coin are miners.. iv used cryptos for a long time and i have never given two flying f%$ks how much it cost to produce the coins. and i dont think many other do ether.