David,
You seem to be valuing bitcoin as a business which could be hard to pin point since there are no real objective numbers. I do not know how much "solving the double spending problem" is worth. I am hypothesizing that bitcoin is better valued when treated as a commodity and that the USD value of bitcoin will have similar characteristics to valuations of metals such as silver and gold. We have data for these existing markets and can try to correlate it with the bitcoin world in an attempt to calculate valuation, market cap, price, mined costs, etc.
I have valued it as a business and you are right that there is no objective numbers.
But I had to start somewhere and thought that treating it as a business was easier than as a commodity.
My reasoning was that during the bootstrap phase, calculating demand for an experimental (and unknown) commodity is problematic because it is essentially zero.
So I treated it as a sales pitch for a VC buy out/in.
Prior to this exercise, all I had was a vibe. At least it gave me some numbers to work with, regardless of how wrong they are.
