You can pay taxes to stay out of jail with fiat, which seems desirable.
If you had only Deutsche Marks to pay would that help you avoid prison?
No. Because they have no value, same as USD, on top of that, they have no price either because there's no demand for Deutsche Marks.
Legal tender of the country I live in allows me to pay taxes and stay out of jail -> it has value for me
Miners will only mine the blockchain with the longest proof-of-work. They won't mine yours, as Bitcoin's preexisting blockchain is longer. This principle was explained in the Bitcoin paper and is the heart of what makes Bitcoin work. Miners can only use their electricity for one thing at a time, thus the competition to secure the underlying asset (energy) forces what might seem to be otherwise unrelated projects to in actuality compete against each other.
I can dig up rocks in a field and they won't be valuable just because I'm tired and sweaty and don't have anything else to show for it
A network of nodes compute stuff together, making data available across the network. It’s like asking why is a distributed network valuable.
During the process of computing, the network validates stuff about the data, guaranteeing it properties, so that people can rely on it to a certain degree when reading from and writing to it.
P.S. Currencies allow you to exchange debt obligations with entities you don't know and for certain entities to issue debt.
P.S.2 I think you should formally define your denotation of value, as you do not seem to follow the usual definition. Same for price.
which you'd better hope is not within your life time, because the implications is that the US has fallen, and that a new world order would've taken over. It is unlikely that you, as a citizen of the west (presumably) is going to fare as well as you are today.
But I know the USA would manufacture some bogus claims about dangerous weapons and go to war rather than letting it happen.
Nothing has intrinsic value, value is a relational and marginal property - I value things differently than you, and you value the first litre of water differently than the thousandth.
Some examples: wampum seashells, mammoth ivory beads, glass beads. None of these have "intrinsic" value.
By the way, the main point of the article I linked is that since humans like to collect random, valueless things (like seashells on the beach) then there must exist an evolutionary explanation for that. Meaning, the behavior must have been selected for.
[0]: https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/C...
You’re putting words into their mouth, they didn’t say scarcity was important at all. They said that it was compelling the supply was finite. We can only guess what they meant since the comment didn’t elaborate, but they maybe meant that if there’s known, fixed quantity of BTC in existence there’s no chance of a big surprise quantity of BTC appearing from nowhere, and causing a price crash as it is exchanged for USD (like the Spanish mining silver in South America).
Personally I’m not convinced by that - price already fluctuates wildly without this, and there are large BTC “deposits” that could suddenly cause a crash (like a few large OG Bitcoin wallets). But I don’t think doing a misread of this comment and using it lecture people on price-vs-value is very persuasive
Like from Satoshi's huge stash?
> there are enormous BTC “deposits” that could suddenly cause a crash if they were used
Of course that Craig Wright thing was a hastily cobbled together lie he came up with based on Back To The Future, but there's still the outside chance the real "Satoshi" could show up and do something.
You realize we can go on github and setup a bitcoin network too, we call it BitcoinYC, our coins have the same properties of bitcoins, why would that have a value?
Please repeat with me:
- currencies (wheter fiat or crypto) have no value. You can't do anything with them, maybe watch dead national heroes printed or them. They hold no assets and don't generate value.
- Currencies have a price though, in other currencies, assets or services. E.g. Both usd and bitcoin are worthless but both have prices set by demand vs supply
- scarcicity does not mean value. Intrinsic value means value. E.g. water has tremendous value but low price. Gold has tremendous value and price. A car has some value, a business has a value. But currencies only have a price.