This is pretty debatable. Bitcoin does have some intrinsic value as a medium of exchange and store of value.
On the opposite end, a can of Cambell's soup has intrinsic value, because it's worth something to someone regardless of what anyone else thinks. The can of soup that Andy Warhol as the basic for his famous paintings has a mixture of both types of value (surely someone will pay significantly more for that can over any other identical can).
That doesn’t seem like a contradiction at all, right? If your fork somehow became well known and replaced the original, then yeah, your fork would have some intrinsic value as a medium of exchange and a store of value.
Intrinsic value is a value outside of perceived value. A can of soup is calories, which we need to survive, as long as it is edible, it will always be worth something to a human. Farm land has intrinsic value because it can produce food. Diesel has intrinsic value because farmers need this to produce food. Bitcoin9890812895, my fork of Bitcoin9890812894 has no intrinsic value to anyone.
Yes, and we're not talking about perceived value. We're talking about intrinsic value from a peer-to-peer network that's used by many people.
Consider a hypothetical Bitcoin, without the objective measures you describe. Without the capabilities of the network, people willing to accept it as payment for goods/services —- it is a coin that nobody has a use or want for, i.e. an unadopted shitcoin.
The value of unadopted shitcoins approaches zero as fewer and fewer people use it. Therefore, the value of Bitcoin is entirely comprised of perceived, and not intrinsic value.
Another way:
Compare a Bitcoin with a banknote. A banknote has perceived value (it represents one, or several, dollars, which have a stable value and are accepted universally) and intrinsic value (it is piece of paper that you could burn to provide a small amount of heat, in a pinch). The Bitcoin doesn’t even have that tiny amount of intrinsic value that the banknote has.
During the Weimar Republic, people burned paper money because it was cheaper than wood. In that situation hyperinflation led to the perceived value falling so low that it was below the paper money’s intrinsic value. If everyone stopped accepting Bitcoin and its perceived value evaporated, that Bitcoin would not even have the intrinsic value remaining, of heat from a single burning banknote.
I was hoping years back that all of this would have taken off for payments rather than silliness. I was wondering if we'd see a (low) Bitcoin value determined by the need to pay BTC transaction fees and those fees being effectively locked up until the next block comes
What's happening is not great for crypto investors, but it's beneficial for people who want inflation to go down (nearly all of us.)
OP was worth at least 64k at some point and now is worth at least 16k. The value and total amount of wealth (in US Dollars) has gone down.
Take Elon Musk, for example. A lot of his wealth is in Tesla stock. But he can't sell that stock without also affecting its price. If he decided to sell all of it tomorrow, the price would plummet and he would only receive a fraction of what it's worth today.
This is what a lot of these companies are doing. I can create 100 tokens and sell you one for $1. In theory, my "net worth" is now $99, since I have 99 tokens that are worth $1 each. In reality, if I tried to sell all 99 of them, I'd quickly find that people are actually not willing to buy all of them for that amount.
I trust money more than wealth. Unsold stock should not be quantified until the moment it is sold.
It's getting tiring to hear about "so and so billionaire lost X billion". No, they didn't lose anything that they didn't have to begin with. Having more stock than the trade volume of that stock means all of that "wealth" is mostly theoretical.
That "theoretical" wealth clearly has a massive impact on the real world, so it's silly to pretend it does not exist. For example, Elon didn't buy Twitter with a giant bag of gold coins -- he borrowed against his wealth, which is mostly in stock.
Because no sane organization will lend out real cash over the same amount of collateral TSLA stock, and leveraged lending opens TSLA to extremely high risk as value dropping would means Musk will be forced to sell to cover/and or stake more TSLA. This is exactly how FTX failed - they counted their own token as their "asset". Spoiler: it didn't work.
Does this wealth have a high impact on the world? Of course it does. But does it has the same impact as same volume of cash? Absolutely not.
> Unsold stock should not be quantified until the moment it is sold.
I don't know Elon Musk's finances, but I imagine that he's got a bunch of stock, (let's say) an amount of cash in the tens or even hundreds of millions and debts well above the amount of cash he has on hand. If you don't count unsold stock, then Elon Musk is poorer than most college students.
I agree the numbers are misleading (e.g. Bill Gates money is very diversified and he has already paid many of the capital gains on microsoft stock sales, so comparing his wealth to Elon Musk's with a single number is quite misleading). But you have to count unsold stock for something.
Do I now actually have $300 in wealth? No, because it's illiquid, and the bid for it more broadly is likely $0, I have to apply a large liquidity discount. It seems like many communities behind these coins have been doing something similar to the internal trading I've been describing here, and hyping them to find outside people willing to trade some of their real dollars for these worthless coins, and those few trades have been used to establish the broader market caps of these things.
All illiquid and somewhat illiquid have this property to varying degrees, ranging from startup stock (no, selling 20% for $1M to a VC doesn't mean your company is actually worth $5M, unless you could find a buyer for all the stock for that much) all the way up to Amazon, Tesla, Apple, etc, because there's no buyer waiting to absorb all the outstanding stock at the current bid. There would be a buyer willing to absorb all of it at some level, but it's likely at a level far lower than the current market cap.
It may not be "real wealth" but it certainly is spending power and psychological cushion, which means different spending choices, which means inflationary pressure.
I had a lot of coworkers who listed crypto holdings on their mortgage application in the past few years. They wouldn't have been bidding as high if the perceived value of those wasn't there.
So in that sense, it _was_ wealth for the holders.
- You start the day with $200,000. You create an NFT and sell it to yourself for $200,000.
- Now you have $200,000 and a $200,000 NFT, meaning you've doubled your wealth to $400,000.
- If you can convince someone to buy that arbitrary NFT at 95% discount, you end up having $210,000 in cash by the EOD.
But you now also have a liability of $200,000. Your total asset is still $200,000 , not $400,000.
> If you can convince someone to buy that arbitrary NFT at 95% discount
so you just sold the NFT for $10,000. If somebody else got tricked into thinking they got a 95% discount - that's on them. A fashion store often marks up their clothing by 100%, and have "sales" of 50%!
Assets are not liabilities, so you'll need to explain why you think it is a liability.
Fashion brands and their physical goods are definitely not the same as NFTs, insomuch as they at least have intrinsic value. NFTs only intrinsic value is they good for ripping off greater fools.
For crypto, no one would want to buy the entirety of bitcoin, because it basically has no value if it isn't traded, so it's effectively worth $0 if someone owns all of it.
For companies, this isn't necessarily true. When acquisitions happen, the current market cap is usually the floor, not the ceiling. I agree with your overall point though.
You and every individual investor could have cashed out but that is as saying that Madoff customers could have cashed out. It's just an illusion. Most of the money disappeared once you deposited and Madoff, SBF, or some other scammer spent it on a new boat or house on an island.
For example, bitcoin has a market cap of $320B. At its peak it was worth about four times that. Did $960B just disappear? Basically, yes.
The coin has no intrinsic value (in the way that a can of corn does, for example). It's worth money because people say it is. And market cap is just a multiple of what it trades for at the margins times the number of shares (coins).
To give an example, say that I bought a bitcoin 10 years ago and that it was my only possession. At its peak, I could have sold the bitcoin for ~$64k, so I had a net worth of 64k. If I didn't sell it at that point and still hold it, I'm now worth ~16k. No one made $48K of of me... there were no transactions in that time period. The "wealth" has simply vanished.