Bitcoin Forum

A lot is focused right now on the price of bitcoins, but what is their value in your mind?
For me it's mostly utility and privacy. I like how it can be used worldwide and trust the decentralized and open source nature of bitcoin.  I think that is a powerful idea and worth owning a chunk of. I'll let the market decide what the price should be. It doesn't change the properties I like about bitcoin.

What, if anything, do you see of value in bitcoin?

bitcoin's value is that it has value

bitcoin allows a level of sovereignty in personal finance that not even gold and silver can provide.

I think what is valuable about it is that it serves certain purposes that simply didn't exist before it. So aside from the fact that it competes with things in other areas (like a store of value with gold) ... as a money protocol for the internet it allows you to do creative and impressive things. I saw someone tip someone on reddit earlier for what amounts to a couple of beers worth of value. That's pretty damn cool. That's new. It's something that is going to be welcomed in the future. And it's just an example of many creative possibilities.

Just so, and unlike obsolete electronic payment systems of the past(PP) there's no need to reveal your real identity to buy someone a beer as thanks or to pay a middleman ridiculous fees for the convenience.

Bitcoin. Anyone can accept it. You don't just lose it or have it just stolen as easily. The private key for one address is probably longer than most people's passwords for anything.

The key value(s) I see in Bitcoin is that:

It is decentralised and the first p2p currency in the world, it is not at the whims of any one government or financial institution. It is by the people and for the people. No government can place a trade embargo on Bitcoin.

It is based on a strong distributed p2p computational foundation which makes it fool proof. (Barring the event of a 50% attack - but with ASIC's in circulation I would argue a 50% attack is far less likely)

It is more far sighted than ANY government issued currency as the release of Bitcoins has been very carefully coded into the framework up until the year 2140.

Minimal transaction fees compared to fiat based online currency transfer systems

Anyone on the planet can send a BTC to anyone, anywhere on the planet, for real. In theory this is possible with providers like Paypal but in practice it can be hard for people in certain countries, such as in countries in Africa, to get an account.

It is unprecedented, it is everywhere, it is growing, it's like something from an awesome science fiction movie with its mysterious beginnings involving the prodigal faceless character Satoshi, it is going to be huge!

It can, with additional development on top of it, support global, decentralized, instant, virtually free, peer to peer micropayments which could revolutionize computing and our ability to make scientific discoveries and technological breakthroughs.

It has value by design.  You can assign value to anything.  But trading socks as a store of wealth isn't really all that easy...  They're hard to move around and easy to counterfeit.  So they don't work well as a currency :P  But they still can be used.  You just won't have a very good time.

Bitcoin's easy to transfer, limited in supply, and impossible to counterfeit.  It does nothing outside of being these three very vital things.  It's exactly like a dollar, except better.  But in the end, we're all just pretending a BTC represents wealth.  As long as a bunch of people are in on it and agree that it is, indeed, a store of wealth, it holds value because we're all in agreement.

OP, reading this might give you an idea: Wrapping your head around Bitcoin (http://www.scribd.com/doc/128352919/Wrapping-Your-Head-Around-Bitcoin-b-w) (a guide ~10min reading time)

Thanks guys, interesting stuff.
It's quite cool to see such a powerful idea rise up from anonymous people cooperating over the internet. We are reinventing money!

1. VERY limited supply
2. Value of allowing a more P2P type of e-commerce and money transfer
3. Attracts those who dislike the current government/banking system the fiat fiscal markets are run by
4. limited supply = as more people want in and to have BTC, the harder they will become and the more rare something is the more value it has.

heck.. look at gold.. a shiny element thats $1650 an OUNCE, and you can't spend it hardly anywhere.