Bitcoin Forum

A telephone, for instance, is a completely useless thing.  You can't eat a telephone.  If you are alone on a desert island, then your telephone is just useless because you have noone to talk to.

Communication tools have some value for you because you believe you will find someone that will be willing to listen to you and talk with you using the same device.

A pen is something juste as useless and worthless.  Sure, you can make nice drawings that you might enjoy watching later.  But truely, unless you find someone who is willing and capable of understanding what you wrote or drew on a piece of paper, then this pen is absolutely useless.


Communication tools are nothing but pyramid schemes.  They are usefull only if other people think they are usefull.




Now I'll stop writing nonsense and I'll start explaining my point.





What I was trying to show here, is how clueless people who think money should have "inherent value" are.   Money has value because it is money.  Period.  Saying that money has no value is just as silly as saying that a hammer has no use apart from nailing nails.

In a nutshell, money is to quantities what language is to ideas.   It is a way to communicate and transfer amounts in a reliable way.   Since it can't be created easily, then if you have some, at some point you must have got it from someone else.  In other words, it doesn't really have value:  it is value.   We tend to forget that "value" is a word that has an arithmetic meaning.   You can say "hello, here is an number: 10" to someone, but by doing so you communicate a number, you don't transfer a value.  Value is a concept which is related to a unit.  '10' has no value, but '10 smurfs' has:  it is a value relative to the total amount of whatever a smurf is.

Money is a tool that is designed to allow the ownership and transfer of such a concept of value.   As such value can then be mapped to quantites of goods and services, money is therefore used to account for ownership and transfer of goods and services.   It is, as I have already said it, a decentralised accounting tool.   It is to numbers what signs are to ideas.

Money has existed since the begining of times.  It is pretty much as old as writing.  And there is a reason for that:  both concepts are analogous.



IMHO

The moon doesn't exist because you only believe it is actually there when you're not looking at it.

I'll agree with you that phones which operate on magic pixie dust and wishful thinking (ie AT&T) are completely useless.  Phones that actually work, however, have value because they save gasoline from not having to drive across town to ask someone something.

Pens save glucose from not having to memorize everything.

Value is measured in Joules.

Oh yeah I confess I forgot about this usage.

I only remembered because I have a drip of Mt. Dew.