even if it never proves to be a viable currency, a secure digital store of value is objectively useful. especially if you're in a country experiencing institutional failure, risk of hyperinflation and so on.
The only reason I don't laugh at these arguments is because I'm utterly exhausted by hearing them. The value prop for bitcoin is, fundamentally, circular. It's valuable because it's money (like gold!), but when you point out how it's an objectively crap currency, it's suddenly a store of value. When you ask why it has value, it's because it's the currency of the future. Round and round it goes.
> even if it never proves to be a viable currency, a secure digital store of value is objectively useful.
I mean, you're just asserting that it stores value. But, why does it have value?
Money's value is also subjective, I'm not sure what you think is objective about it.
Sounds like you're just trying to dodge the comparison.
Not only is that not true, but if to was it would just render “money” a non-concept, because definitionally value (in general, not just of money) is subjective.
The purpose of any monetary system is to facilitate the exchange of goods and services. That’s why humans make money; to avoid the need to barter or depend on social credit systems that don’t scale well. This provides us some objective goals with which we can compare and contrast monetary systems against; while what one does with money is subjective, we can objectively compare the efficiency and ease with which a monetary system can facilitate transactions. In this area Bitcoin does terribly. This is probably why Bitcoin advocates have mostly moved onto “it’s a store of value”, that’s more a more defensible proposition.
“Everything is subjective” is a (reasonable) epistemological argument about all access to data about the world being through subjective lenses, and thus all conclusions about the world being grounded in subjectivity. But that's not the sense in which value specifically is subjective.
Value specifically is subjective because value is dependent on the subjective utility functions of people who have (or who might seek to acquire) the good and it's competing/alternative goods.
> This provides us some objective goals
That's about the value of a monetary system not the value of money, but both the specific goals, and more particularly how they are weighted against each other, remain subjective and the source of considerable disagreement.
Ok. How much does ease of use matter for the value of a currency? 50%? 20%? 80%? What about all it's other characteristics?
You can certainly be objective when comparing each characteristic in isolation but the value of the currency depends on how all of them are weighted against each other, and that is completely subjective.
Just like the value of anything else. Even the same person might change the weights they use to value something depending on what's going on in their life.
The original poster's argument was that we all "waste" power watching pornography and going on skiing trips, so how dare we judge Bitcoin. My counter argument is that they're mixing up energy usage between subjective and objective utility in an attempt to shift Bitcoin into a harder to compare category.
Subjectively, how can we judge the relative utility of a kWh spent on entertainment? The utility of each of the activities listed (minus Bitcoin) are all literally in the eye of the beholder; we can't possibly hope to compare the utility of a kWh spent on pornography vs. skiing. Obviously we can compare energy usage per minute of each, but comparing the utility of a kWh spent running a ski lift vs. PornHub's servers really just breaks down to which form of entertainment you value more.
My issue is that Bitcoin is supposed to do something objective; it's supposed to be money. This means that we absolutely can (and should!) sit down and compare it against its alternatives on numeric values, such as kWh consumption. The moment one starts actually comparing Bitcoin against its direct competitors in measurable categories it starts looking really bad, which is probably why its proponents try to prevent that.
> You can certainly be objective when comparing each characteristic in isolation but the value of the currency depends on how all of them are weighted against each other, and that is completely subjective.
Back to value now.
Ideally currencies aren't supposed to have value per se, rather other things are supposed to have value in terms of it. Obviously this runs into the reality of multiple currencies and exchange rates, but at the local level it actually works this way. You and I might disagree about the relative value of a product, but we express our own disagreement in terms of dollars. We don't disagree about the relative value of the dollar itself. This is why inflation is usually measured in the shift of common goods and services in terms of dollars, since measuring the value of the dollar itself is a fool's errand.
As far as the value of Bitcoin in terms of USD, that's a subject that has been pretty thoroughly dug into. I doubt that I'll add anything new and interesting here.
According to whose ideals? Currency is a thing used as a medium of exchange. Like any thing used in trade, it will have value determined by supply and demand, both to individuals and in broad markets, and like all things that value will vary individual in ways that are subjective but in some broad patterns predictable (e.g., declining marginal utility is true of money as it is of anything else, though the fungibility of money suggests that the decline should be slower in terms of how much additional utility you can derive from money, compared to other things, before losing any given proportion of starting marginal utility.)
> You and I might disagree about the relative value of a product, but we express our own disagreement in terms of dollars.
That's not because we agree on the value of dollars ($/util) but because we agree to use dollars as a currency of account and/or medium of exchange.
> We don't disagree about the relative value of the dollar itself.
Relative to... what? I mean, the entire idea of mutually beneficial trade requires disagreement on relative value of the goods exchanged, and that doesn't change when one side of the exchange is dollars. So, yes, we probably do disagree on the most relevant relative value of dollars to the exchange, otherwise the exchange wouldn't happen.
I don't care how you value something (in terms of how much utility it gives you), I care how much utility it will cost me to get it from you. I don't need to concur with you on the value of the dollar to exchange dollars with you for goods.
> This is why inflation is usually measured in the shift of common goods and services in terms of dollars, since measuring the value of the dollar itself is a fool's errand.
Measuring what you can exchange something for is measuring it's (market) value, which is the only measurable (on a ratio level) kind of value. Subjective utility can be measured (with difficulty), but only to an ordinal level (x > y), and only for an individual.
Everything else you’ve listed provides subjective value to the user, which makes them hard to attack. Who can say what the value of skiing is to a society in terms of kWh? There is no way to objectively compare the value of energy spent on a ski lift vs. driving to see friends; that’s all subjective value.
But the issue is that Bitcoin isn’t supposed to provide subjective value, it’s supposed to provide objective value; it’s literally supposed to be money. Once you remember that it’s supposed to literally be money, then comparisons to ski lifts become extremely disingenuous. It also becomes fair to compare Bitcoin against other competitors that provide the exact same service to society, comparisons that make Bitcoin look very wasteful indeed.