That applies to small companies where you're significant in any way. It does not apply for ~anyone investing in stock market. The larger companies neither care what you think nor know that you exist. Your investment has no impact on it and the price you get is a result of collective belief influenced by predicted valuations.

If you invest in large companies on the public stock market, it's about the same as investing in cryptocurrency.

I think you make a fair argument, but it breaks down immediately under two separate but related counterarguments.

1. If companies don’t care what they’re valued at, it makes M&A infeasible. A business could never be sold.

2. Selling equity is done to raise cash. If no one cares what the business is valued at, equity is worthless, and 1. is infeasible.

That's not quite what I wrote. The larger companies don't care about you as the retail investor, but they of course care about valuation. But the valuation is often based on some belief / future predictions. Otherwise we wouldn't have large changes and following corrections. The value of the business does not change that much - the collective idea about the value, opportunity, chance of speculation, and other things influenced by the validation is what changes. Also no company would complain about having too high valuation as long as it's consistently too high.

> If I buy a company, I literally can choose what to do with its earnings. That’s the point of valuing businesses. You’re not buying the stock. You’re buying a portion of the business.

I used to think that, but then I saw what happened to TSLA this year. I don't think that these markets are as different as you think they are.

Just as an aside, you cannot build the Bitcoin blockchain overnight as well - because of proof of work and network effects of bitcoin full nodes. That gives it "value". It's function is to serve as that - a store of value.

The difference to me is that gold is a precious metal with finite tangible volume. It can be used to create goods. So, there’s value there.

But Bitcoin was designed to be a currency. Certainly the software is worth something. Or maybe nothing really. Look at other FOSS.

As far as a currency goes though? I don’t want my currency to fluctuate.

The idea of bargaining with an employer or client to pay me “more” this week versus last because the value of the currency dropped 11% is ridiculous.

Bitcoin is dead on arrival because it’s design doesn’t evade the central banking problem. A currency cannot have a limited supply when value as a production of labor is not limited.

The intrinsic value of gold (i e. for jewellery/electronics uses) seems likely to be much less than the current market value of gold. So I don't think those limited use cases are a good explanation for gold's value.

Also, Bitcoin was not necessarily designed to replace every fiat currency for every single everyday spending use case and it's a strawman to imply that if it can't do then it's "dead on arrival". There are plenty of important possible use cases which don't presuppose the collapse of all fiat currencies.

Finally we don't really know the volatility of Bitcoin in the long term. It hasn't existed long enough. Looking at the price behavior in the first decade of its existence is not likely to give you a promising picture of any new asset class.

Sure, voting is something different. I didn’t say they were the same. I said they were similar. Also, I know plenty of people who purchase stocks simply to make money: I don’t know anyone who does to vote.

The existence of companies that have voting and non-voting shares allows us to measure how much voting is worth. Google's non voting shares trade at basically the same value as their voting shares. Berkshire Hathaway's reduced voting right shares trade at basically the same value as their full voting right shares.

Whatever drives the value of shares it's not voting rights.