>So scarcity pays no role in value? Is the Mona Lisa not valuable?

You're mixing up things. I can draw a one-off picture, that doesn't make the drawing valuable (sadly. If you want to buy my paintings, hmu). The value needs to be attributed by a shared denominator, which for the example of Mona Lisa is cultural prestige. Crypto has zero inherent cultural prestige, it's only value lies in social attribution. Wallets on hard drives are meaningless unless we decide that they aren't. The mona lisa isn't worth what it is if we decide otherwise, but it does have inherent value. Crypto does not. For crypto to have value, someone else needs to pay Dollar/Euro/whatever at an exchange. That's the value of crypto - the exchange rate.

> For crypto to have value, someone else needs to pay Dollar/Euro/whatever at an exchange. That's the value of crypto - the exchange rate.

This is true for every economic good, including paintings. Whether the value is "inherent" or not is irrelevant, you need a transaction or the value is just theory. Culture could also forget about the significance of the Mona Lisa, it has happened before, see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes_Palimpsest, a mathematical text that our culture considers having very high value, but was overwritten into a prayer book by a culture that considered the work less valuable than the material it was written on.

OK, maybe the Mona Lisa was not a good example. But if somehow Da Vinci had produced a billion copies of the Mona Lisa it would not be nearly as valuable! My other point in that paragraph was that if a country prints more units of currency the value goes down, so scarcity is important to value.

Scarcity isn't 100% important for value - leverage is. Leverage can be tied to scarcity, but doesn't have to, it all depends on the goods which are being exchanged. Artworks exist just once, coupled with the attributed prestige the value increases. Guns exist a bunch, their price doesn't scale relative to their scarcity. Food is not priced relative to the amount on the market, but to the demand of the consumer. If the demand is high and so is scarcity, the price rises, but if demand is low but scarcity is high, the price stays low. [...]

Modern art reproducers can make copies of the Mona Lisa that experts can't easily distinguish from the original. This kind of replica fraud happens often in the art world. I find it interesting to try to justify the value of the original when it is almost zero cost to have an exact replica of the original. The scarcity is not real, or at least the scarcity of being able to enjoy the intrinsic value of looking at the painting is not real. When you remove that part, the value lies only in being able to verify the authenticity of the work, rather than in its quality as art.

NFTs = attempted cultural prestige for crypto?

Ha, nice. Problem: art receives value wrt the artwork, not the canvas, so the screenshot-meme wins. (Unless the cultural prestige lies in the underlaying technology itself, in which case the piece of art is the blockchain-implementation, not embedded content)

Sure, but it is a suitable canvas, is it not?

If an artist signs an NFT or Colored Coin with a keypair that is associated with their public identity, shouldn't that be analogous to an autograph? If a physical, signed artistic work has more value than an unsigned work, does that mean that if you take the physical artistic work out of the equation you're left with the value of the signature? It's a funny question I guess. Like imagine people collecting PGP autographs.

Maybe art has some intrinsic value, but I think a large part of the "value" of an art piece is associated with the cultural relevance of the piece. It would follow that if you can associate a transaction output with some cultural relevance in the same sense that traditional artwork does, then it could have value, albeit not much.

> Problem: art receives value wrt the artwork, not the canvas, so the screenshot-meme wins.

This assumes that an original painting and a perfect replica of it have equal value. That might be the case if you don't know which is the original, but in the case of the Mona Lisa - and in the case of the NFT - you almost certainly can figure that out.

Every crypto coin trading at 0USD is likewise scarce.

You need to pay attention to the actual economic transactions taking place. Looking at a graph of pure speculative value and calling it an economy is, more or less, a scam.

You'll see that when it all disappears.. moreso than the cashflow of, eg., an actual business.

It is true that not all scarce things are valuable. But isn't scarcity is a good quality for a currency? Fiat currencies fail because of money printing.

I think many cryptocurrencies are useless and driven purely by marketing and speculation and most tokens are unregulated securities. Bitcoin is someone's attempt at inventing an "ideal" currency and it is being bootstrapped into value and existence. How else could it work? Maybe it will fail, maybe not.

> Imagine BTC was actually used for any scale of economic transactions. It would collapse overnight.

You never explained why and I am honestly interested in your reasoning here. Are you implying BTC can't scale? It seems like two contradicting thoughts - if it is used, then it becomes less valuable.

> Is the Mona Lisa not valuable?

That's such a silly argument. There are thousands of paintings around the world with the same level of scarcity as the Mona Lisa, but have far less value.

Scarcity drives up prices on items that already have some perceived value. It doesn't create any value itself.

Scarcity can support existing value - e.g. in creating a Gold Standard or some other means to artificially limit money supply - but it is not an intrinsic value. There are countless things that are both scarce and valueless.

I believe your last two sentences hit the nail on the head (albeit being oxymoronic). Things have value because people are willing to pay for them. That's it. If companies can be traded below book value, Tesla can be worth more than the next five automakers combined and NFTs can cost six digits there seems to be no intrinsic value.

I think Bitcoin will have as much value as the hypercard protocol has now. It's not really as valuable as Mona Lisa but you could say it has some value.

Another issue of HN debates values.