> Bitcoins have no value

It's money (a currency). Money has value because someone says it has value and someone else agrees. Congrats, bitcoin has value!

The nature of that value may be volatile and doomed to drop severely or go away entirely in the future, but that doesn't make it non-existent now.

> It's money (a currency). Money has value because someone says it has value and someone else agrees. Congrats, bitcoin has value!

Commodities have value. Until 1971 in the US, US currency had implied value because it could be exchanged for a commodity - gold, which the US has thousands of tons of in Fort Knox and other places. Then in 1971, Nixon stopped the exchange of currency for that gold.

But the tons of gold are still in Fort Knox. Why? Why store thousands of tons of gold? Obviously it is still backing the currency. Any currency panic can be ended by starting the conversion back up. US currency went from an implied conversion to an implication of an implication. It is still backed by those thousands of tons of gold though, although not explicitly.

Bitcoin is backed neither explicitly nor implicitly by an useful commodity.

Your second paragraph seems to be heading in the direction that bitcoin doesn't have value because it lacks the robustness of being backed by a useful commodity. This is only vaguely less than orthogonal though. The robustness of a currencies value, while related, is not the same thing as the value of said currency.

If the gold disappears tomorrow dollars would not become worthless. People would still use them as value stores which can be exchanged for goods and services (despite a lot of questions about where the gold went). Similarly, Bitcoin is (now) exchanged for goods and services which have value.

Then comes the interesting question of "why is gold valuable?". If we assume the apocalypse and you have gold and I have guns, bullets, and canteens you could bet your boots I'm not interested in trading.

If you're certain bitcoin is valueless AND you're right I urge you to continue convincing me. This could be one of the best short opportunities since the housing crisis of 2006.

Gold is a commodity has value because it can conduct electricity, fill teeth and so forth. Historically it has been used as a currency because it is portable, uniform, divisible and durable. It has had value for thousands of years, through many of the calamities of history. Guns tend to have many laws with regards to them, and lose value over time - the muskets of the late 18th century are near worthless except as collector's items.

Commodities have value due to their utility. Dollars were useles in 1968, but you could exchange them for a useful commodity. The value was implied. With the exchange cut off, it is an implication of an implication.

It possibly could survive even more indirection. The US government could begin emptying Fort Knox gold ton by ton, implying it would tax or somehow get commodities from taxpayers or traders if necessary to back the currency. Then it becomes even more abstract. Right now a currency panic could be stemmed by simply turning gold convertibility back on. Gold has no magic properties, it just has the qualities of a good currency (portable, divisible, durable...)

Germany used to keep the majority of its gold reserves outside Germany. In 2013 it began pulling this gold back to Germany. Why? Why bring it back now? Why have gold reserves at all? In the industrial countries, paper currency was exchangable for a useful commodity until around 1971 when the US closed the window, which is around when all countries closed the window.

Also, currencies have what is probably a 10,000 year history, perhaps even longer in some form. What is called fiat money has existed for at least 900 years. Other financial mechanisms of this type have been around longer. The desire of governments to go into debt, to run printing presses and have the paper which comes out have a price, is not new. Our current system has existed for less than half a century, and in my view won't outlast panics, wars and such. Which has a simple meaning - at some point in the future, the US or Germany or some major industrial economy will be forced to open its gold window again to stem some future panic.

> Dollars were useless in 1968,

Hmmm. Go on....

> but you could exchange them for a useful commodity.

That sounds useful though. That sounds like dollars have (or represent or store) utility.

Really, it sounds like you're making the point that Bitcoin isn't a commodity and is therefore valueless, which I have a tough time agreeing with (the marketplace also currently disagrees with the idea). Neither real-estate nor services are a commodity and they both have economic value.

If that's not your point it seems that there is a misunderstanding of what "useless" and "has no value" mean in the context of describing Bitcoin (and dollars?), and that we've not come to terms on what those phrases exactly mean so that we ensure we're examining the same set of thoughts built with the same set of words.

You don't see intrinsic value in bitcoin as a commodity. But what if I told you that controlling bitcoin token gives you right to make a new data entry in a global, immutable ledger which cannot be censored and does not have to be maintained by a 3rd party. This can be used for example to do proof of existence, proof of publication or storing hash of important information "forever" (book keeping). This definitely has value for some. And this useful property is to bitcoin as conductivity is to gold. It does not dictate its monetary value, it determines its lower-bound value as a digital commodity.

A Bitcoin has no inherent value. The only value attributed to Bitcoin is that someone, somewhere had to spend electricity to create a Bitcoin.

Sort of like when you eat in the morning, go to work and get a paycheck, your work has value.

Now, is the Bitcoin price crazy? Maybe a little bit, but it's reacted very strongly to the Donald Trump election since it's considered to be alternative to existing remittances that cannot be taxed (IE, remittances to Mexico).

Now in regards to your scammers, Mt Gox was the only exchange and you know 'power corrupts... I forget the saying'

Butterfly Labs got raided because they took a lot of money from the community for mining gear and delivered nothing.

The scammers do tell me something. In my view Bitcoin has some real utility and 'value' precisely for the same reason that it attracts so many scammers. As long as people want some form of digital, hard to track, irreversible way to exchange things that can't be duplicated then Bitcoin will have some value. Drugs, guns, donations to political organizations, scamming, etc etc. Those are big forces with a fair amount of market value; If Bitcoin is the best way to trade in them then of course it will have value.

Bitcoin and other blockchains are not currency, they are platforms and infrastructure. Currently, Bitcoin doesn't have a lot of intrinsic value, but as more and more core services (DNS, identity, etc...) migrate over to the blockchain/s it will eventually increase its value and come out of the _initial_ speculative phase.

The blockchain is essentially a globally distributed transactional log, that allows you to build things that require synchronization and consistency, it just so happens that moving assets is the most obvious application.

Currently it's pretty slow, but work is being done, specially in ethereum to speed it up. Things like proof of stake over proof of work as well as sharding should make it a lot faster, and capable of processing several thousands of transactions a second. Ethereum is also the next step in the evolution of the blockchain, with the addition of a Turing complete virtual machine it is now possible to execute arbitrary code and have a truly programmable block chain. This allows it to be used for virtually anything without having to roll your own blockchain, for example you can program a truly distributed naming system that would allow alyisyng anything out there to human readable names, from IPs to to arbitrary hashes in a distributed file system, or even fisical people, granted they have a virtual presence of some sort and and a unique hashed handle.

The other important aspect of it is the possible symbioses with the distributed/decentralized web or web3 or next web. Decentralization seems to be the theme for the next several years, and I personally am extremely optimistic about some or all of it becoming real and currently actively trying to contribute to it in any way I can.

However for decentralization to become economically vaiable an intrinsic way of incentivation is required and this is one more place where the blockchain will be what makes it possible.

To sumarize:

* Blockchain is a platform not a currency

* It enables synchronization on a global distributed scale

* "Next web" and blockchains go hand in hand. On the one hand providing the backbone infrastructure required to run some critical parts of web3, on the other providing a transparent digital aset management system which you can build incentivation on top of.

On a side note, I wouldn't necessarily trust Buffet and company on this one, for one, it requires a pretty good understanding of the technologies involved to be able to make any sort of informed prediction, and I'm not sure if you can perform any sort of typical fundamental analysis on it at all, which is a common practice in his business line, and yes currently the bitcoin price might be somewhat speculative, but that will change as more and more core infrastructure relies on it.

As for scammers, raids and etc... That's pretty common in a nascent complex and deregulated environment such as this, remember the WWW at the beginning ;)?