Topic: Why is bitcoin (crypto) worth anything at all?? - page 2. (Read 765 times)

I know exactly how a car works and that is exactly why I do not drive one . The car working has absolutely nothing with safety at all, safety comes from driver and I do not trust myself to operate such a complex machine.

I know it is just pedals and wheel these days but that doesn't change the fact that I will not be doing anything at all that would be stupid, I will still do something idiotic and crash, I know myself hence I never got a license at all, I was tested before twice and drove a car at supervision of a teacher and I got perfect score twice, both of the times teacher told me I would be one of the good ones driving and that scared me even more.

Long story short, applying that to crypto, just because you know how it works or why it worths something doesn't mean that you should like something, or not knowing doesn't mean you should hate it, you could know and love or hate, or you could have no idea why it worths and still love or hate, knowing is irrelevant.

To your first question the answer is yes.  Though this dose not prove I know the answer to 'why'.  I do not know the answer to 'why' a car works, but i still choose to drive one. It is not necessary to know the answer to 'why' to use try something new.

As for your second question, sure why not?, pm me, a signed address that you own and post over to the signature signing thread and have it quoted (https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.57198327)  and I will send some amount of my crypto to it. (This offer only applies to paxmao, all other pm's will be ignored).

FTFY

The real problem you're facing boils down to this: economics is hard.
On the face of it, there are several layers of "applied economics" where you find a buch of equations to explain common effects of certain behaviors, e.g. "what happens if I print more banknotes?".

But there's also an underlying "philosophy" of economics, which is a lot harder to grasp.
What does it mean for something to "have" "value"?
What does it mean for someone to "own" something?

There's a common thought experiment of the first Neanderthal who ever pointed at the ground and told his fellow Neanderthals "this is mine".
Oh, they laughed so hard.
Ugrulug, what you mean "this is yours"?

There is no natural law to claim ownership of something you simply have.
OTOH, there is a natural law to claim ownership of something you made.
But in practically all real-world examples, something you made also contains something you simply had before.
So, you created a bow and arrow out of a few sticks and stones?
Great for you, the bow and arrow are yours, but the sticks and stones that are part of the bow and arrow, why are they yours?
Now, Ugrulug will claim that the sticks and stones are his, because they were found on "his" land.
But why was it Ugrulugs land in the first place?

And that's where basically everything breaks down.
There is no natural order of things that would define the concept of ownership.
But that concept is the basics for a popular understanding of economics.


Now, there's another approach, and that is the concept of ownership as a social contract.
I.e. society (whoever that is) agrees on a set of rules to define ownership.
Why would they do that?
Because it's useful.

If someone can lay a claim on land, he can be certain that no-one will take away the grain he seeded on this land.
If someone can lay a claim on a hut he built, he can be certain that no-one will simply sleep in it without asking him first.
And that certainty incentivizes people to actually produce more.
A society where everyone produces more is more productive.
A more productive society will outcompete other societies.
In a kind of evolutionary arms race, societies with a higher level of organization and laws will become dominant over others.
Those societies with less rules and laws will become extinct.
But I digress.


Because now there's a new kid on the block.
It's called "intellectual property".
It does not (necessarily) contain something that existed before.
In a way, there actually is a natural law to claim ownership of intellectual property.
But there's a catch:
Intellectual property is not unique.
It may be copied.
Again, there's no natural law against copying.
And again, it may be useful for a society to protect intellectual property nonetheless.
But still, we're left with a social contract that has to protect it.


Now there's a corollary to that concept of a social contract:
Contracts may be breached.
Or, since they have to be accepted by society as a whole, they may be changed or replaced, if and when society decides so.


Fast forward to 2008.
Again, there's a new kid on the block.
Bitcoin.
It is something.
But what exactly is it?
Is it property?
Is it intellectual property?
Is it some kind of thing simply protected by a social contract?
Yes, it is, it's protected by a social contract set in code and enforced by the computers of numerous users.
So is it really special?
Well, that depends.
"A" Bitcoin is a kind of intellectual property, but it's also one that cannot simply be copied in any meaningful way.
It is protected automatically and there's no simple way to change the rules of this specific society.

And that's what makes Bitcoin kind of special.
It's still something like intellectual property (which is being used as "money") protected by a kind of social contract, but unlike others, this contract is practically a lot more secure.
Think of so-called "socialist" countries where the general social contract to protect property rights is being unilaterally breached.
Something like that is impossible, or at the very least highly unlikely for Bitcoin.
A more "social contract-secure" property is more useful than "regular" property.

And that, in a nutshell, is why Bitcoin has value.
It's more useful than other kinds of property.

My quick answer to your question is: Do you have any crypto? and if so, would you give it to me for free?

My guess is that yes, and no, so you know perfectly well that it has a value to you, and that applies to many other people, so yes, it has a value because a group has agreed that this is a resource valuable to them and they are only willing to trade it for a value in other asset, thus the answer is served.

Bitcoin is valuable because many projects use it.  Like Tesla uses a lot of bitcoins.  And many other projects that use bitcoin.  And also many miners are carried out by mining projects.  When a large project wants to release btcoin, then bitcoin will decrease in price, such as the issue of Tesla wanting to release bitcoin which was tweeted by Elon Musk through his Twitter.  Automatically greatly affects the price of bitcoin.  With the bad news from Tesla, bitcoin automatically decreased and also the number of mining projects in China increased again, the price of bitcoin fell again.

In this world anything depends on demands and supply. Bitcoin has limited supply, when limited supply adopted by so many countries and traders then price can go at any point. limted supply and more adoption by worldwide makes bitcoin worth anything at all. earlier there was big investors only but now bitcoin has almost every class money at their marketcap. So not easy to manipulate bitcoin price now.

While I admit to having certain knowledge in certain domains, specifically in technological circles. I must profess I am no expert in economics, and the only reason I passed it in University was because the professor graded my exam by saying "well that's not right - but I know what you were thinking" and gave me an 80%. Thank god for mind reading professors.

I think the value of bitcoin or any other crypto starts within you. With how you percieve it, with how you give importance to it and with how you provide time and effort for it. No matter what type of currency, the worth of it is decided on how much people are demanding and using it. The law of supply and demand would always apply on how a certain currency becomes more valuable and that can also be one of the reason why banks are not allowed to make too much paper money other than the detrimental effect it may cause for a country's economy.

Oh, a smurf account starts a topic in economics, this must be entertaining

"Pleasing people" may not be a suitable term for "fulfilling needs/wants" of people but yeah, hard work alone without satisfying any demand would be meaningless.
About the worth of goods/services, it's all subjective and created from collective subjective valuations from people. In the beginning there was no price, but enough users think that BTC is valuable. After there is an initial price, there is price memory, and snowballed until forever or not enough people think that BTC is valuable.

If you are working in a company or even a daily waging professional their average salary increases every year on most of the country but countries with the high inflation rates are actually losing the purchase value so people are actually making less money than previous year which they never understand because they don't know what is called inflation.

Venezuela over-created its national currency, destroying their economy.  Because of the infinity of printing money, their money has no value. Different from bitcoin,  Bitcoin is printed with a certain supply.  When people start to trust and use bitcoin, the price also goes up.  And vice versa if there are many people who don't use the price, the price will go down, even to Zero Price like you said.  I totally agree with what you said.

I think the topic of 'hard work', 'value' and 'pleasing others'  warrants an interesting topic on their own, and I, myself, started going off in this thread, which as I reflect now is off topic from my original question.  If someone wants to start a topic on that an applicable forum, i would be happy to comment further.

I think the best shortest explanation that satisfied my query was from odolvlobo


Other key take-aways for me include

• Bitcoin (and altcoins in general) are worth what they are worth simply because that's what people are willing to pay for them.
• Bitcoin like paper money may have no intrinsic value on its own, but to its utility to provide /purchase other tangible things
• If Bitcoin does have intrinsic value it is the fact that it is de-centralized, and yet still can be governed by things like digital signatures, and is unique in the respect that as more is created, more is secured, unlike all other digital assets where copying decreases the value.
• If someone buys a 1000 meme coins at $0.001. and a few days later that meme coin becomes worth $1.00 on exchanges. This does not imply the person made $999.00. This  is only true if the person can convince others to buy their coin for the $1.00.  Some will be able to do this at first, but it will get harder as more people sell, the value will decrease.  Therefore, you can't simply give 1000 meme coins to a bunch of people and then a 'tweet' suddenly makes them oodles of money. It will make a certain percentage of people that value, but it will be small and not last for very long.

This is the biggest trouble in human history. How do you know if something is a very valuable hard work and something is a useless hard work.

I am 100% sure that someone who works at mcdonalds works much much harder than Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos combined, why? Because those people are actually working and doing something whereas the other two just tells others what they want done and that's it, and for some reason they are richer, not because they are better than anyone else, they did something that eventually worth money by abusing others by using their parents money, sure anyone with low ethics and parent money could have but only these two achieved, yet both Elon and Jeff took money from parents, couldn't fail because they were kept paid by their parents, and then they abused others work tirelessly without chance of union so that they could basically allow tax payers to pay whatever their own workers needed, how is that fair hard work that made them worth so much?

Here is an example.

a) I create an online game, I spend hundreds of thousands of hours working on it, tweaking it, making it work exactly like I envisioned in my mind, giving no consideration to what others may want, how they want it to look, or what elements they may like (or not like to see).  That was hard work

b) I invite people to play the game, they try it, a few kind of like it but most find it un-interesting, or boring, or 'lacking' in some way.  It did not please them, it did not fulfill a need for entertainment, enjoyment, or give them back something they otherwise felt lacking in (or perhaps didn't even know they were lacking only until after they played it. They were not pleased


Let us assume that 'success = making money' (at least for the purposes of this thread)

Making money requires they be pleased (ie: the opposite of 'b') .  People will not buy things unless they believe it is giving something they want. People buy on the emotion and later justify with rationalizations.  It does not necessarily require 'a' (though most people seem to think that 'hard work' = 'success' it simply is not true.

All 'rich' people had to figure out how to please 'someone' else to be rich, not necessarily 'everyone'.

Also - You can still be 'selfish' and please other 'selfish' people. ie: invest in my idea and it will make YOU a million dollars! (and also happens to make me $10 million).

Your comment completely misses the point. What does “pleasing people” have to do with “working hard”? Sure, some jobs require both, but not always. Many professional activities lack a social or humanistic component.

People can be selfish bastards (many rich people are), without "pleasing" anyone their entire lives, while achieving tremendous success in their business and earning incredible amounts of money.

I think you are confusing 'working hard' with 'pleasing people'  If you dig a whole in the ground all day long, perhaps this may please you, but does it please others?  If the hard work you do does not please others, does not benefit others in society in some way, then it is unlikely to make you any money...but it was still hard work that went into it.

If I worked for a company for 10 years, just made enough to live on, and the company never made a profit (and eventually went out of business because it failed to sufficiently please others). I still worked hard.

There is a gamble, when you start a task their are no guarantee who or how many will benefit or be pleased by it. You can research and do statistics, and try and 'hedge your bets' that your hard work will pay off, but in the end if your work pleases no one, it does not diminish how hard your worked, it was just a bad gamble.

It's just that the author shows a typical mistake of a typical inventor of the perpetual motion machine, but only in the field of economics It's just that the author shows a typical mistake of a typical inventor of the perpetual motion machine, but only in the field of economics He is well aware of some illogicality of his reasoning, but puts it down to the strangeness of the world. However, some modern methods of responding to supply and demand do sometimes take exotic forms, but still eventually come down to long-known norms and schemes; D

There are some people who never learn. And they never will...

like I said, Elon will be Elon, his money speaks on this, It's only natural that there would be a some groups that would follow him as it's business and as they think Elon will bring them up on the ladders. If Elon decides to FUD then shit happens, but still if there would be any other large groups out there to contradict this shitty event then he won't be likely affect the market.

The world isn't strange, it's rational. Economics is essentially understanding how individuals or groups of people respond to incentives, and the rest of it is just understanding supply and demand.  The anecdote about bottled water is just a failure to understand that markets develop and new products develop to satisfy new demand.

The irony is that OP ends the post with the same basic misunderstanding he starts the post with. The post starts with "if everyone was given $1m then there would be no poverty" and ends with "if all poor people were just given meme coins and then we pumped them all there would be no poverty."  It seems OP never learned anything from his "naive" days afterall.