Yes, that's how scams and con games are played too. I personally can't tell the difference between a cryptocurrency and the classic gold brick scam.
While at a theoretical level different crypto tokens are the same that will not be how the market plays out. That sort of computing power isn't easily replaced and while it exists Bitcoin is unique. So it does have value at the moment, but the value is not inherent in the protocol.
The argument is essentially that the computing and hashing power has intrinsic value for other use cases it could be reapplied to if not doing this. It could, but that value would accrue to the person selling the energy and/or the hardware, not whoever held the token at that time.
If you think about it, what you actually mean is that you don't recognise the utility, not that there isn't utility there. If we do a classic comparison with gold, pretty much nobody gets any utility out of the gold, and yet a tonne of gold still has very high intrinsic value because it has just enough utility to some rare people.
> It could, but that value would accrue to the person selling the energy and/or the hardware, not whoever held the token at that time.
That isn't how anything else works. Little of the value of the economy accrues to the people who mine coal or oil, but they provide most of the raw grunt to make all of everything work.
The economy doesn't have to directly link creation of value to who gets rewarded.
I wasn’t comparing anything to gold (or whatever other asset). The energy expended is cited as a reason for the value of the token, but the utility of that energy, even if it were a near infinite amount, is still zero, because it’s already been expended. It’s a fully sunk cost.
The magic that people try to conjure by saying the cost of mining means it’s valuable is provably not true. That energy isn’t stored as value in the token, it’s gone.
To use your analogy - I’m not saying the value accrues to the miner of the coal/gold/whatever. It accrues to the owner. The asset in this case is not the token, it’s the energy.
The re-deployment of that energy to other use cases is not a transaction between the purchaser of the energy and the owner of the token, it’s a transaction between the purchaser and the energy company. In dollars.
In real terms it’s worth whatever the next buyer is willing to pay. It annoys me that people cite the run-up over the last decade as evidence of it’s brilliance when it’s nothing of the sort, but I’d just sound like a loon screaming into the wind.
Personally I think it’s worthless. Honestly I suspect Satoshi Nakamoto (if they’re still alive) probably thinks the same; One of the later posts Satoshi made before disappearing was making the point that if it accrued any value at all then it would be useable to transact and therefore viable.
The problem is that if that’s true of Bitcoin, it’s also true of all tokens, meaning the scarcity argument is entirely imaginary - if one token is perceived as too expensive then the perception of value will shift to another that’s viewed as ”cheaper” (and thus more likely to “mooon!”), meaning the supply of tokens taken as a whole is actually infinite and arbitrary, rather than scarce, and the value of the cryptocurrency market as a whole is therefore infinitely and arbitrarily small per unit (i.e. worthless).
But what do I know? I’m just some loon screaming into the wind.