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Author Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.  (Read 2032123 times)
Erdogan
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April 05, 2015, 10:34:17 AM
 #22461

Value, as a concept, is inherently subjective.

Therefore the "intrinsic" adjective is redundant so should be just dropped for correctness once you grok the value=subjective bit. Intrinsic value is a sloppy term, historically used to describe the objective physical properties, e.g. conductivity, malleability, corrosion-resistance of gold, silver, lead. The intrinsic properties of objects can be valued, but the existence of the properties themselves is an objective reality that can not be extended to the human values placed upon them.

No. The word intrinsic means in itself, and it is perfectly proper to use. It is not conflicting with subjective.

Subjective allows for different values to be assigned by different individuals, which is important for the freedom, as in free market. Subjective is also a good word. But since all value is subjective, it is not useful for distinguishing between money and other things.

The intrinsic concept is important for understanding the difference between money and other valuable things. You can use other words, for instance value for direct use, but the word intrinsic is good and I protest the theft and destruction of that word.

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The Bitcoin network protocol was designed to be extremely flexible. It can be used to create timed transactions, escrow transactions, multi-signature transactions, etc. The current features of the client only hint at what will be possible in the future.
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April 05, 2015, 10:52:40 AM
 #22462

To be able to distinguish intrinsic value from exchange value is essential in understanding money and essential for understanding why bitcoin is good money. It is the basis for discussing Aristoteles' definition of money, Mises' regression theorem and gold. Without a clear understanding of these simple concepts, the discussion degenerates into gibberish.

I don't care if Warren Buffet does not understand it. That only shows that you can be a successful business man without that specific knowledge. But in this thread, which is the center of bitcoin knowledge, it should be the basis for discussion.

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April 05, 2015, 03:18:36 PM
Last edit: April 05, 2015, 04:43:24 PM by Zangelbert Bingledack
 #22463

Absolutely true. Value is a "nominalization" to borrow a term from NLP: http://youtu.be/1sceRsmT1yc

To further elucidate the points made in the video, nominalization (a.k.a. reification, or what Mises called hypostatization, the tendency toward which he named "the worst enemy of clear thinking") is when you convert an abstract concept or action/process into a noun, and then end up treating that noun as a sort of "thing in itself" and allow it take on some properties of a physical object. As a loose figure of speech it is innocent enough, but - as is always the case - when we try to take loose phrasing from everyday talk into more rigorous contexts without cleaning it up, the result is mass confusion leading to all sorts of fallacious reasoning. As the speaker said, politicians love to make use of this confusion.

Another way to talk about this is to call any conversion of an abstract concept or action/process into a noun "nominalization," since that what it literally is, but then to call the fallacious taking-seriously of this "reification" or "hypostatization." My preferred term is reification to refer to the error.

Some classic nominalizations and corresponding reifications:



As may be evident from the examples, when you start off with a loose nominalization (using nouns because they're convenient in English) you can end up committing the fallacy of reification. How exactly does the slip happen? There is actually another semantic error at work here: equivocation, where a word is used in two different meanings at the speaker's convenience, or inadvertently.

In other words, what happens in each case is that the noun form of the word being the same as the verb form makes it especially easy to switch back and forth between them, and pretty soon the people forget that the noun they are talking about is not an entity, but actually some process that itself involves physical objects or entities: water molecules that wave, people that value gold bars, mileposts that are spaced out. It's incoherent to speak of a wave without something doing the waving, or to speak of gold having value without someone doing the valuing, or to speak of space curving if we are maintaining that space=nothingness. It becomes an implied equivocation because the meaning of "wave," "value," and "space" has subtly been allowed to change in the course of the argument. Whereas we started off taking it as obvious that some objects were waving, some people were valuing something, and some objects were spaced, we ended up silently shifting the meaning to exclude those objects and people.

Now the term "intrinsic value" might have been useful if not for this reification trap. We could use it to refer to the direct use value people place on something, as opposed to its exchange value in the market, as even Mises himself did. Unfortunately, all experience hath shewn that the word intrinsic overwhelmingly tends to lead people into the reification error described above, because this is a basic human tendency baked into the social pressure of language (things that "sound right" tend to carry a weight that feels like social authority). Intrinsic sounds like "in and of itself," with no reference to a valuator. This tendency makes using this word just asking for trouble. It invites misunderstanding time and again.

To be clearer, then, I strongly recommend avoiding the term "intrinsic value" and instead using "direct use value" or similar to distinguish from exchange value.
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April 05, 2015, 03:23:53 PM
 #22464

pack your bags.  we're going up.
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April 05, 2015, 03:41:10 PM
 #22465

pack your bags.  we're going up.
I don't think so we now have the long Easter weekend, when it is expected and and quite obvious to see no price movement at all. I think that more than 70% of BTC trade is in China right now. They don't have an Easter there, so it is just as I expect bitcoin is brice is stagnant.


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April 05, 2015, 03:46:13 PM
 #22466

pack your bags.  we're going up.
I don't think so we now have the long Easter weekend, when it is expected and and quite obvious to see no price movement at all. I think that more than 70% of BTC trade is in China right now. They don't have an Easter there, so it is just as I expect bitcoin is brice is stagnant.

in years past, we've had monster ramps during Easter weekend.  everyone sitting home with nothing to do except trade bits.
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April 05, 2015, 03:48:31 PM
 #22467

pack your bags.  we're going up.

again ? :-)
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April 05, 2015, 04:06:01 PM
 #22468

The Only TV News Report On The Economy You'll Ever Need

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HN2iVe8_Ato
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-04-04/only-tv-news-report-economy-youll-ever-need

NUMBERS Angry
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April 05, 2015, 04:56:12 PM
 #22469

Absolutely true. Value is a "nominalization" to borrow a term from NLP: http://youtu.be/1sceRsmT1yc

To further elucidate the points made in the video, nominalization (a.k.a. reification, or what Mises called hypostatization, the tendency toward which he named "the worst enemy of clear thinking") is when you convert an abstract concept or action/process into a noun, and then end up treating that noun as a sort of "thing in itself" and allow it take on some properties of a physical object. As a loose figure of speech it is innocent enough, but - as is always the case - when we try to take loose phrasing from everyday talk into more rigorous contexts without cleaning it up, the result is mass confusion leading to all sorts of fallacious reasoning. As the speaker said, politicians love to make use of this confusion.

Another way to talk about this is to call any conversion of an abstract concept or action/process into a noun "nominalization," since that what it literally is, but then to call the fallacious taking-seriously of this "reification" or "hypostatization." My preferred term is reification to refer to the error.

Some classic nominalizations and corresponding reifications:



As may be evident from the examples, when you start off with a loose nominalization (using nouns because they're convenient in English) you can end up committing the fallacy of reification. How exactly does the slip happen? There is actually another semantic error at work here: equivocation, where a word is used in two different meanings at the speaker's convenience, or inadvertently.

In other words, what happens in each case is that the noun form of the word being the same as the verb form makes it especially easy to switch back and forth between them, and pretty soon the people forget that the noun they are talking about is not an entity, but actually some process that itself involves physical objects or entities: water molecules that wave, people that value gold bars, mileposts that are spaced out. It's incoherent to speak of a wave without something doing the waving, or to speak of gold having value without someone doing the valuing, or to speak of space curving if we are maintaining that space=nothingness. It becomes an implied equivocation because the meaning of "wave," "value," and "space" has subtly been allowed to change in the course of the argument. Whereas we started off taking it as obvious that some objects were waving, some people were valuing something, and some objects were spaced, we ended up silently shifting the meaning to exclude those objects and people.

Now the term "intrinsic value" might have been useful if not for this reification trap. We could use it to refer to the direct use value people place on something, as opposed to its exchange value in the market, as even Mises himself did. Unfortunately, all experience hath shewn that the word intrinsic overwhelmingly tends to lead people into the reification error described above, because this is a basic human tendency baked into the social pressure of language (things that "sound right" tend to carry a weight that feels like social authority). Intrinsic sounds like "in and of itself," with no reference to a valuator. This tendency makes using this word just asking for trouble. It invites misunderstanding time and again.

To be clearer, then, I strongly recommend avoiding the term "intrinsic value" and instead using "direct use value" or similar to distinguish from exchange value.

that's probably not a bad idea. 

the term "intrinsic" has been abused quite markedly in the whole Bitcoin vs gold debate, especially when describing gold.  it reflects both a laziness in the use of the language or just sheer inability to understand the multiple facets and intricacies of gold valuation and how they compare to something even more complex, ie, Bitcoin.
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April 05, 2015, 05:08:31 PM
 #22470

pack your bags.  we're going up.

Soon?
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April 05, 2015, 07:16:23 PM
 #22471

pack your bags.  we're going up.

Soon?


Soon is all relative.
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April 05, 2015, 07:38:23 PM
 #22472

Value, as a concept, is inherently subjective.

Therefore the "intrinsic" adjective is redundant so should be just dropped for correctness once you grok the value=subjective bit. Intrinsic value is a sloppy term, historically used to describe the objective physical properties, e.g. conductivity, malleability, corrosion-resistance of gold, silver, lead. The intrinsic properties of objects can be valued, but the existence of the properties themselves is an objective reality that can not be extended to the human values placed upon them.

 ^ This

"If people value something, it has value; if people do not value some­thing, it does not have value; and there is no intrinsic about it."

or, as someone on reddit put it more boldly:

nothing is fucking intrinsically valuable.

in yet other words: "the eval() function is context-sensitive"

PGP key molecular F9B70769 fingerprint 9CDD C0D3 20F8 279F 6BE0  3F39 FC49 2362 F9B7 0769
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April 05, 2015, 08:06:06 PM
 #22473

Mycelium now working with Trezor.  Dynamite combo.
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April 05, 2015, 08:33:49 PM
 #22474

Value, as a concept, is inherently subjective.

Therefore the "intrinsic" adjective is redundant so should be just dropped for correctness once you grok the value=subjective bit. Intrinsic value is a sloppy term, historically used to describe the objective physical properties, e.g. conductivity, malleability, corrosion-resistance of gold, silver, lead. The intrinsic properties of objects can be valued, but the existence of the properties themselves is an objective reality that can not be extended to the human values placed upon them.

 ^ This

"If people value something, it has value; if people do not value some­thing, it does not have value; and there is no intrinsic about it."

or, as someone on reddit put it more boldly:

nothing is fucking intrinsically valuable.

in yet other words: "the eval() function is context-sensitive"

We can stay here all day talking about the definition of intrinsic value, but at the end of the day, what some people refer to when they say "intrinsic value" is that people use it for itself and not only for its functions as money (medium of exchange; a unit of account; a store of value).

Example: People use gold for itself (jewellery etc). Therefore gold has "intrinsic value".
You can call it whatever you want, thing is, it's something fiat money or bitcoin don't have.
Whether that "intrinsic value" is culturally determined or not doesn't matter. RIGHT NOW people use gold for itself. They don't do that with fiat or bitcoin.
It's quite simple really.

By the way, I'm no gold bug and I don't use that argument to say that gold is better money (because I don't think it is).



"Im here to tell you the ability to publish information to an immutable globally shared memory system (history) is its intrinsic use"
^^^How is that the intrinsic value of a bitcoin? It's the blockchain that can do that not bitcoin, bitcoin is the blockchain security mechanism/reward token. Any distributed ledger/database could do that.

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April 05, 2015, 08:37:54 PM
 #22475


 But in this thread, which is the center of bitcoin knowledge,


are you on crack? sane people occasionally pop in here, but mostly it's a troll thread for self-deluding old scatterbrains

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April 05, 2015, 08:44:55 PM
 #22476

Value, as a concept, is inherently subjective.

Therefore the "intrinsic" adjective is redundant so should be just dropped for correctness once you grok the value=subjective bit. Intrinsic value is a sloppy term, historically used to describe the objective physical properties, e.g. conductivity, malleability, corrosion-resistance of gold, silver, lead. The intrinsic properties of objects can be valued, but the existence of the properties themselves is an objective reality that can not be extended to the human values placed upon them.

 ^ This

"If people value something, it has value; if people do not value some­thing, it does not have value; and there is no intrinsic about it."

or, as someone on reddit put it more boldly:

nothing is fucking intrinsically valuable.

in yet other words: "the eval() function is context-sensitive"

We can stay here all day talking about the definition of intrinsic value, but at the end of the day, what some people refer to when they say "intrinsic value" is that people use it for itself and not only for its functions as money (medium of exchange; a unit of account; a store of value).

Example: People use gold for itself (jewellery etc). Therefore gold has "intrinsic value".
You can call it whatever you want, thing is, it's something fiat money or bitcoin don't have.
Whether that "intrinsic value" is culturally determined or not doesn't matter. RIGHT NOW people use gold for itself. They don't do that with fiat or bitcoin.
It's quite simple really.

By the way, I'm no gold bug and I don't use that argument to say that gold is better money (because I don't think it is).



"Im here to tell you the ability to publish information to an immutable globally shared memory system (history) is its intrinsic use"
^^^How is that the intrinsic value of a bitcoin? It's the blockchain that can do that not bitcoin, bitcoin is the blockchain security mechanism/reward token. Any distributed ledger/database could do that.

still doesn't get it  Cheesy

just do us a favor and get your sorry concern troll ass out of here.


"I believe this will be the ultimate fate of Bitcoin, to be the "high-powered money" that serves as a reserve currency for banks that issue their own digital cash." Hal Finney, Dec. 2010
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April 05, 2015, 08:48:31 PM
 #22477

Value, as a concept, is inherently subjective.

Therefore the "intrinsic" adjective is redundant so should be just dropped for correctness once you grok the value=subjective bit. Intrinsic value is a sloppy term, historically used to describe the objective physical properties, e.g. conductivity, malleability, corrosion-resistance of gold, silver, lead. The intrinsic properties of objects can be valued, but the existence of the properties themselves is an objective reality that can not be extended to the human values placed upon them.

 ^ This

"If people value something, it has value; if people do not value some­thing, it does not have value; and there is no intrinsic about it."

or, as someone on reddit put it more boldly:

nothing is fucking intrinsically valuable.

in yet other words: "the eval() function is context-sensitive"

We can stay here all day talking about the definition of intrinsic value, but at the end of the day, what some people refer to when they say "intrinsic value" is that people use it for itself and not only for its functions as money (medium of exchange; a unit of account; a store of value).

Example: People use gold for itself (jewellery etc). Therefore gold has "intrinsic value".
You can call it whatever you want, thing is, it's something fiat money or bitcoin don't have.
Whether that "intrinsic value" is culturally determined or not doesn't matter. RIGHT NOW people use gold for itself. They don't do that with fiat or bitcoin.
It's quite simple really.

By the way, I'm no gold bug and I don't use that argument to say that gold is better money (because I don't think it is).



"Im here to tell you the ability to publish information to an immutable globally shared memory system (history) is its intrinsic use"
^^^How is that the intrinsic value of a bitcoin? It's the blockchain that can do that not bitcoin, bitcoin is the blockchain security mechanism/reward token. Any distributed ledger/database could do that.

still doesn't get it  Cheesy

just do us a favor and get your sorry concern troll ass out of here.



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April 05, 2015, 09:02:37 PM
 #22478


Example: People use gold for itself (jewellery etc). Therefore gold has "intrinsic value".
You can call it whatever you want, thing is, it's something fiat money or bitcoin don't have.
Whether that "intrinsic value" is culturally determined or not doesn't matter. RIGHT NOW people use gold for itself. They don't do that with fiat or bitcoin.
It's quite simple really.

By the way, I'm no gold bug and I don't use that argument to say that gold is better money (because I don't think it is).



"Im here to tell you the ability to publish information to an immutable globally shared memory system (history) is its intrinsic use"
^^^How is that the intrinsic value of a bitcoin? It's the blockchain that can do that not bitcoin, bitcoin is the blockchain security mechanism/reward token. Any distributed ledger/database could do that.

I happen to agree with you but I would tend to use ironic statements instead:

I can blow my nose with paper money.  So it has "intrinsic value".  I look at people who would waste gold on making jewlery and find it is rather analogous.  Copper is much more useful than paper, but the same weight of paper in paper money is considered more valuable.  Miners for some reason do not want to accept $200 in pennies for a bitcion.

But the next time someone says gold has intrinsic value therefore worth more, offer that five cents in pennies should be considered worth more than a hundred dollar bill by the same argument.  Dollars, Euros, bitcoin, they are all tokens in a monetary system.

What gives bitcoin more value over say, its many other altcoins?  It is all of the people who decide to back it.  It ironically is the most light weight cryptocurrency because there are many spv-wallets, whereas often altcoins only have Satoshi clients.

sdp

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April 05, 2015, 10:25:18 PM
 #22479

Absolutely true. Value is a "nominalization" to borrow a term from NLP: http://youtu.be/1sceRsmT1yc

To further elucidate the points made in the video, nominalization (a.k.a. reification, or what Mises called hypostatization, the tendency toward which he named "the worst enemy of clear thinking") is when you convert an abstract concept or action/process into a noun, and then end up treating that noun as a sort of "thing in itself" and allow it take on some properties of a physical object. As a loose figure of speech it is innocent enough, but - as is always the case - when we try to take loose phrasing from everyday talk into more rigorous contexts without cleaning it up, the result is mass confusion leading to all sorts of fallacious reasoning. As the speaker said, politicians love to make use of this confusion.

Another way to talk about this is to call any conversion of an abstract concept or action/process into a noun "nominalization," since that what it literally is, but then to call the fallacious taking-seriously of this "reification" or "hypostatization." My preferred term is reification to refer to the error.

Some classic nominalizations and corresponding reifications:



As may be evident from the examples, when you start off with a loose nominalization (using nouns because they're convenient in English) you can end up committing the fallacy of reification. How exactly does the slip happen? There is actually another semantic error at work here: equivocation, where a word is used in two different meanings at the speaker's convenience, or inadvertently.

In other words, what happens in each case is that the noun form of the word being the same as the verb form makes it especially easy to switch back and forth between them, and pretty soon the people forget that the noun they are talking about is not an entity, but actually some process that itself involves physical objects or entities: water molecules that wave, people that value gold bars, mileposts that are spaced out. It's incoherent to speak of a wave without something doing the waving, or to speak of gold having value without someone doing the valuing, or to speak of space curving if we are maintaining that space=nothingness. It becomes an implied equivocation because the meaning of "wave," "value," and "space" has subtly been allowed to change in the course of the argument. Whereas we started off taking it as obvious that some objects were waving, some people were valuing something, and some objects were spaced, we ended up silently shifting the meaning to exclude those objects and people.

Now the term "intrinsic value" might have been useful if not for this reification trap. We could use it to refer to the direct use value people place on something, as opposed to its exchange value in the market, as even Mises himself did. Unfortunately, all experience hath shewn that the word intrinsic overwhelmingly tends to lead people into the reification error described above, because this is a basic human tendency baked into the social pressure of language (things that "sound right" tend to carry a weight that feels like social authority). Intrinsic sounds like "in and of itself," with no reference to a valuator. This tendency makes using this word just asking for trouble. It invites misunderstanding time and again.

To be clearer, then, I strongly recommend avoiding the term "intrinsic value" and instead using "direct use value" or similar to distinguish from exchange value.

You are right that the word can be misused. I protest the distruction of the word through this misuse, and state that "intrinsic" value as the value otherwise referred to as value "for direct use", is good.

The alternative "for direct use" can also easily be muddled by people not wanting the secrets of money to be revealed. For example, a wholesaler have no direct use for his wares, due to the share volume he trades, that does not mean that the value of his commodity is not intrinsic.

I am really annoyed by the "intrinsic value is impossible, the value is subjective, stupid" lectures that is going on. I put forward that the value of something is intrinsic, not that it is objective. Of course it is subjective, no value can exist unless there is someone that prefers one thing over another, with no responsibility towards nature or anyone else to explain why he thinks so.

If we let trolls destroy every word, discourse is made impossible, which may be the purpose of the destruction of the word. Again I propose that this forum and this thread is at the forefront of understanding gold, fiat and bitcoin, and we need clear concepts. I cannot correct these errors in all threads, the volume of confusion is too high, but in this limited space it is possible.



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April 05, 2015, 10:59:00 PM
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Example: People use gold for itself (jewellery etc). Therefore gold has "intrinsic value".
You can call it whatever you want, thing is, it's something fiat money or bitcoin don't have.
Whether that "intrinsic value" is culturally determined or not doesn't matter. RIGHT NOW people use gold for itself. They don't do that with fiat or bitcoin.
It's quite simple really.

By the way, I'm no gold bug and I don't use that argument to say that gold is better money (because I don't think it is).



"Im here to tell you the ability to publish information to an immutable globally shared memory system (history) is its intrinsic use"
^^^How is that the intrinsic value of a bitcoin? It's the blockchain that can do that not bitcoin, bitcoin is the blockchain security mechanism/reward token. Any distributed ledger/database could do that.

I happen to agree with you but I would tend to use ironic statements instead:

I can blow my nose with paper money.  So it has "intrinsic value".  I look at people who would waste gold on making jewlery and find it is rather analogous.  Copper is much more useful than paper, but the same weight of paper in paper money is considered more valuable.  Miners for some reason do not want to accept $200 in pennies for a bitcion.

But the next time someone says gold has intrinsic value therefore worth more, offer that five cents in pennies should be considered worth more than a hundred dollar bill by the same argument.  Dollars, Euros, bitcoin, they are all tokens in a monetary system.

What gives bitcoin more value over say, its many other altcoins?  It is all of the people who decide to back it.  It ironically is the most light weight cryptocurrency because there are many spv-wallets, whereas often altcoins only have Satoshi clients.

sdp

You are both basically correct, and I love it when people use the word intrinsic correctly. You can find intrinsic value in most everything, like you said with blowing your nose with a fiat bill. We know that gold has intrinsic value, because it has been used to make beautiful things, it is easy to form and it is in fact shiny. What we don't know, and cannot know, is the extent of the intrinsic value compared to the total value. With the bills, we can know that the intrinsic value is small, because you can use cheaper stuff to blow your nose. It is so small that the most correct thing is to disregard it completely, and say that fiat money has no intrinsic value. The same goes for bitcoin.

There is a problematic point with fiat for example used to light up your cigar - destruction of value just to show that you can afford it, to display your wealth. The same with gold, you don't have to destroy it, albeit that is also possible, as people eat leaf gold sometimes. With bitcoin it is also possible to show off, you can flash your phone's wallet, or even better, you can sign a message with the key of a large wallet, as Loaded did. None of this is in my opinion intrinsic value, but maybe we can invent a new word for the concept: Meta-value, the value of displaying value.

You say intrinsic value as gold have, does not make it better money. I agree, in fact I think the money is better without intrinsic value, and I like to call that pure money. But in saying so, we disagree with Aristoteles and Mises, both reputable and well known persons. I think they were wrong, good money does not have to have intrinsic value. To excuse the old masters, it can be said that money with no intrinsic value in fact was impossible at the time. The general population at the time would never prefer a written note or a copper token coin to gold, so it would be impossible. Then and now, it is the traders who define, with their preference, what is the best money.

A contemporary gold bug says that gold is better because gold has intrinsic value. Bitcoin is nothing because it lacks intrinsic value. They are wrong, and this is the crux of the discussion. The gold bugs will have to come over, and they will.  





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