edsanville wrote:
Kshartle wrote:
You say I'm wrong when you won't trade me a million bucks for it, just like
everyone else on Earth. I can sit around and believe it's worth a million, but everyone else knows I'm wrong and they prove it by only offering me ten bucks for it!
That's the real-world expression of my wrongness.
Kshartle, don't you see the irony in your argument here? You're saying that, because the market refuses to pay you a million bucks for your shirt, it "proves" that your subjective valuation (shirt = million bucks), is "incorrect."
Currently, the market
is paying about $900 for 1 bitcoin. By your own logic, that proves that
you're incorrect for not valuing bitcoins.
Either that, or valuation is entirely subjective.
You argue that bitcoins
objectively have no value. Is your hypothesis a disprovable one? What would have to occur for you to agree that bitcoins have value? If bitcoins are worth $100,000 in 5 years, would you admit that they actually have value? What about 10 years? 20 years?
If there is literally nothing that could ever happen to change your mind about this, then your argument is based on faith alone, not rationality (Karl Popper).
If there is nothing that could ever change my mind that 2+2=4, is my argument that 2+2=4 based on faith alone? I'm not familiar with Karl Popper, but if he said this,
he's clearly wrong, and I wouldn't use that quote anymore.
I promise you, I avoid faith-based arguments more than I avoid the plauge. It's possible for me to slip up of course, but by God I try really hard to take nothing on faith unless I don't care enough to spend the time learning about it. This is not the case with bitcoin in which I am very interested.
The question of whether or not bitcoins have value require that we agree on the definition of value, otherwise we run the risk of disagreeing about different things.
From Webster's:
1: a fair return or equivalent in goods, services, or money for something exchanged
2: the monetary worth of something : market price
3: relative worth, utility, or importance
4: a numerical quantity that is assigned or is determined by calculation or measurement
5: the relative duration of a musical note
6a : relative lightness or darkness of a color
b : the relation of one part in a picture to another with respect to lightness and darkness
7: something (as a principle or quality) intrinsically valuable or desirable
1 & 2 are price. I think we can agree on that. Since everything has a price but some are willing to buy, sell and ignore it is clear that price and value are different things. Value is a convinient word to substitute for price but not what I'm refferring to. Clearly bitcoins have a price. The question is do they have any value.
4, 5, 6a, & 6b are completely unrelated.
3 & 7 are the definitions I've been referring to when I say bitcoins have no value. While an individual's assesment of value is subject, the question of whether or not something has value is objective. A bitcoin isn't better or more useful than anything, if you take away it's price. The price is the only justification for value and the price is being justified by characteristics that don't convey value (scarcity, ease of transfer, cost to mine). Additionaly the price is being justified by the belief that more people will want them and pay more for them. The price is sell-justifying. A bitcoin cannot be used to do anything, it can just be traded for something that can be used. Well......ANYTHING can be traded. Bitcoins are easily tradable, but so is any electronic file and a whole host of other things. Bitcoins might be scarce, but scarcity doesn't make something valueable. Harry Browne explained this several times and Iv'e written about it throughout the thread.
With regards to intrinsic value, I think it's pretty clear. Bitcoins have no property that anyone desires for their own sake. Intrinsic value is a tricky topic. We have a thread on here covering it in detail, it's too expansive for me to go into with this post. If you disagree and want to argue that bitcoins have intrinsic value, I'd be happy to hear the argument.
Regarding the shirt example....The argument has been made that belief alone conveys value, as if magically something can become valuable just because I beleive it. I don't recall the exact exchange but I think it involved how do you prove that someone's subjective evaluation is incorrect. Well...I think it's pretty obvious if I pay a million for a T-shirt or just "believe" it's worth that much the fact that I can't find
anyone else who agrees is proof positive that my subjective valuation is wrong.
This is not the case with bitcoin which i claim has no value and yet has a price. The two examples do not contradict each other. In the case of bitcoin there are BILLIONS who agree with me and will not and have not traded a single dollar for them. There are very, very few who hold them or who have paid the market price for them. People are not holding them for a useful purpose. They are hoping the price will go up. That a portion or really a fraction of the population thinks they are worth the current market price doesn't make it so anymore than if I pay $1,000,000 for a T-shirt now makes it worth that much.
Does the difference between the two make sense? Have I been clear enough or would you like me to elaborate? - Sincere question
Bonus question - If clean freshwater was suddenly so abundant that it's price was zero (meaning no one would would trade anything else for it) would it still have value? Same question with gold. Now how about bitcoin?
What do you think?
