I believe you are missing the point I was trying to make.
I was stating that nothing, not even bitcoin or money or gold or water has intrinsic value. Anything can have value to a person who is in need of a seller's goods. That was not my argument. Things have subjective value. Things do not have some mystic intrinsic property that makes them inherently valuable.
Nothing has intrinsic value. When you say something can be used or has value, you are speaking subjectively.
To be valuable economically, something just needs to be both scarce and sought after. Just because they are valuable to a specific set of persons does not mean they have intrinsic value.
Pricing of goods and services is emergent in nature, based on demand, scarcity and rate of consumption.
The 'bitcoin hype' is exactly what you are describing when you say:
> Ccs only make sense as a transactional money analog
Bitcoin was designed to just be a general accounting ledger that can't be forged. It is supposed to be a transactional money analog.
The 'value' that you should be investing in when talking about bitcoin is not its price in dollars, but rather that the idea:
The 'value' in bitcoin is that non-mutable accounting ledgers will be more reliable and provide a better account of economic activity over some duration than its pre-existing counterpart. The only way it will lose this is if the security of the system breaks.
I think ippsec recently set up a mirror for himself where you can download all of his videos, but his videos on youtube are tremendous help on my way to OSCP. He does walkthroughs of boxes hosted on hackthebox shortly after they retire.
It's a shame to see this type of content at risk of being blacklisted.
> Of course, VISA runs call centers, offices, and a whole lot else on electricity as well, which isn't counted in this comparison. But those hardly matter due to the extreme difference between the two figures.
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I think this absolutely needs to be counted, because it is an operating cost of the entity. With bitcoin, there are no call centers because by design, the transactions are irreversable.
When pitted against the total cost of financial institutions, which all independently hold massive amounts of customer data, which should be considered a liability due to the recent issues with consumer data here in the West. This further increases the operating costs of each institution because they are running servers to house account data.
Imagine a global, catastrophic EMI event. Even a temporary one would cause introduce to these systems (like visa), a higher likelihood of race conditions where accounts will not reconcile, causing a higher cost to converge.
Bitcoin does not necessarily have this problem.
If we are truly worried about the future costs of running financial systems, maybe we should also add liabilities into the mix.
I was stating that nothing, not even bitcoin or money or gold or water has intrinsic value. Anything can have value to a person who is in need of a seller's goods. That was not my argument. Things have subjective value. Things do not have some mystic intrinsic property that makes them inherently valuable.