Sadness

I use dot matrix printers every day. I need them, and so does everyone who prints on 2-part or 3-part forms. So your analogy is fitting, since it shows how you declare things worthless when you are blindly ignorant of relevant facts.

Then you dig yourself deeper by talking about the worth of a dot matrix printer in terms of resale value. I bought it because I needed to use it, and it has already paid for itself many times over by saving the time and ink it would have cost to print everything twice. I have personally printed hundreds of thousands of 2-part pages on dot matrix printers in the past 10 years.

Plus, dot matrix printers are still the best in terms of speed for certain applications. Sometimes they are worth more than other printers. All the companies that still sell ink ribbons aren't doing it because they're delusional.

As for your inability to understand plain logic, I think you're playing dumb. Yes, 1 bitcoin is 1 bitcoin. First you act like you don't know that, and then you say it's so obvious that it's not worth saying. But then you take the time to point out that 1000 minus 800 is 200. Very good, you can do math when it suits you.

But you still can't determine the worth of something when you don't have enough relevant information. And you don't.

I admit, your hindsight is very good. You now know that people could've waited and bought bitcoins cheaper. Good boy, very smart. But for some uses, such as buying certain altcoins, 1 Bitcoin still buys the same amount as it bought several months ago. So it turns out that Bitcoin does have value completely separate from its price in dollars.

For me, Bitcoin is like a dot matrix printer. I bought it because I needed to start using it immediately, I got my money's worth, and I'll buy more as I need them no matter what the current price. Of course, since I anticipate needing them in the future, I might buy extra if I think I'm getting a good buy. Maybe I'll be wrong and they'll be even cheaper next month, but either way I still need them for things that are worth more than I paid.

Get it? Of course you don't. But if I need 1 dot matrix printer to do $5000 worth of work over the next year, $1000 is a good price. If the price later changes to $200, that doesn't take away my printer or the value of the work the printer does. And I don't want to spend 6 months without a printer while I'm waiting for the price to drop, so I still don't regret paying $1000. It was still a good buy, unless you want to lend me your time machine so I can take a currently-priced $200 printer back to myself last year.

Here's your quiz to see if you learned anything: If I buy 1 dot matrix printer for $1000, and it saves me $5000 over 1 year, and then the price drops to $200 - how much money have I lost? How many dot matrix printers do I have left, after the change in market price?

If I buy 1btc for $1000 and use it to place a buy wall on an altcoin exchange, bolstering buyer confidence and driving the price up, allowing me to sell my altcoin for an additional $5000 profit without actually spending any of the 1btc, then I still have 1btc and $4000 extra dollars. How much did I "lose" using your math?

I just saw a similar situation yesterday at Cryptsy. Fractalcoin has been at 1999 satoshis for weeks, but somebody put 1BTC at 1997. It influenced people, even though .96BTC of it is still there, and the price immediately went to 2499 where it still is today. Fractalcoin is limited to 1 million coins, and block reward is 1 coin. The only way to get a lot of them is with Bitcoin. It doesn't matter how much that guy paid for his 1BTC, it served the same purpose and is worth the same to him as it would have been a few months ago. And that 1BTC can buy more Fractalcoin today than it could buy a few months ago, so for that purpose Bitcoin is worth more than it was worth a few months ago.