Do you not consider those 'economic value'?
I wonder where the 50x difference goes.
> At current prices, just the block rewards make the Bitcoin network running cost something like $37bn/year.
The block rewards are "free", it is hard to come up with a way to account for the cost of something which is invented from thin air.
The better comparison would be how much the electricity and mining hardware per year is used compared to the transaction work done.
Logic would say, though, that the money spent mining and the BTC->USD value of block rewards would be similar (that is the margins on bitcoin mining tend towards zero).
However with the volatile pricing of bitcoin, you would have to generate a BTC->USD value for each block reward and not convert a year's worth of rewards on a particular day's (or minute's) spot price.
It would be the same with Bitcoin. Retailers have no interest in eyeballing the Bitcoin exchange rate and dynamically repricing their goods every 5 minutes. Unless Bitcoin becomes price stable, or the currency in which they pay all their expenses, they'll always be deferring to payment processors.
Bitpay charge 1%, which isn't even that cheap.
> The block rewards are "free", it is hard to come up with a way to account for the cost of something which is invented from thin air.
It's not "free". They spent a fortune in amortized equipment costs and energy to win that reward. The bottom line is the miners need to sell their 12.5 BTC block rewards to cover their real world costs (+profit). So, in a competitive mining environment, the block reward coupled with the market price is a proxy for the minimum cost of running the network. This is one factor in market prices.
I can arrive at a store entrance, and in 30 seconds be leaving with a new macbook, paid for on my VISA card. I can then pay it off 56 days later without paying any charges or interest.
If i couldn't do this the store would almost certainly make fewer sales.
At current prices, just the block rewards make the Bitcoin network running cost something like $37bn/year.
As a ledger it's strictly inferior in every way. (The ability to take bitcoin 'offline' by holding your private key, or exchanging it on secondary markets, is not a feature of the blockchain itself. These features can exist without a blockchain).