These costs include electricity, mining equipment, personnel, and warehousing.
As with normal equity valuation, these costs would be transparent, allowing for valuation to take place.
Since Bitcoin is decentralized and its "employees", or miners, are disparate; costs are not known.
This information asymmetry is one cause of Bitcoin's unbounded price discovery.
That's wrong. Bitcoin isn't worth $X because miners are expending $X resources to obtain it. Miners are expending $X because people are buying bitcoin for $X.
Imagine a lottery where the reward is an ounce of gold which is worth $1200. A ticket costs $10. There is a guaranteed winner at the end of the lottery. When the lottery ends a random ticket will be selected and the owner gets the gold. Buying more tickets increases your chance of winning. Therefore participants will try to buy slightly less than $1200 worth of tickets. If the price of gold rises to $2400 people will buy twice as many tickets.
The block reward for mining is decreasing on a regular basis. Resources spent on mining will decrease because of lack of profitablity. If bitcoins value is dependent on mining then why isn't it decreasing with every year?
It cannot feed me, it cannot protect me from the elements, I cannot grow food on it and is not a tool to help me create something desirable by the others. Hence it has no value.
That it has no value during an apocalyptic scenario, does not mean it does not have value in the non-apocalyptic times.
In order for me to exchange it for goods, as you described, there must be someone who has the goods and is willing to exchange them for bitcoin. There is no real reason for someone to do so.
It is not an apocalyptic scenario. That’s what 90% if the population fight for, day in day out. Food, protection from the elements, security.
Bitcoin's underlying technology creates the possibility of decentralized governance, starting with currency, which is the connecting link between actors in societies based on economy.
Why such a future might be beneficial to mankind is that banking and finance being controlled by a few has led to errors with systemic consequences.
See the 2008 financial crisis and hyperinflation in Venezuela and Zimbabwe. See the seizure of funds by governments from individuals in Greek and Cyprus, scenarios where many of the affected did not write their own doom (others wrote it for them).
Why is bitcoin more valuable in this regard than any other altcoin?
Just curious, do you think paper currencies have intrinsic value?
A limited supply coin does not guaranty a need to exchange goods over that particular coin and not another.
Currencies used to represent the gold stored by each government. These days currency represent the trust that the system that uses the currency, will trade goods for it. However we had to go through the gold equivalent to get here.
Bitcoin doesn’t represent anything and has nothing to back it up.