Monero is worth, to me, whatever it is I can afford to pay. My hard drive space is nothing compared to the bandwidth it takes to both utilize my own hard-drive space as well as share the blockchain with as many people as possible, which may will be worth much more than $.18. Again, this is under the idea that the price of hard drive space will trend toward zero because legitimate pruning is a possibility and not just size reduction.
When assessing a cost, I use three dimensions:
- time
- money
- emotional energy (a.k.a. stress or attention - I hardly have to consider physiological energy in my costs)
I believe a large amount of people are using money considerations to hide the real cost they are paying: emotional energy, in the form of frustration.
(this may cognitive dissonance at work, but not sure yet)
Time is a good one. Currently I'm trading not more than 1.67 years of continued debt slavery just to hold and own Monero. In all likelihood, it will be less time than that, but for now that's the number I'm personally coming up with. That is the price I've chosen to pay.
Money typically has a variable value when compared to one's income (which tends to go up and down, preferably up), and factoring in proper interest on outstanding debt in order to use money at one point in time rather than another will take the value of a dollar and change it to either a few cents, all the way up to an easy 40 dollars. Quite a large spread, depending on the person, so vastly speculative. But the good point to make here is - if for every dollar you spend, do you expect to make back more than 40 dollars, per dollar, within the timeframe you're operating on? My timeframe extends well past a decade, because my debt slavery is longer than that, so my answer
is yes, has reasonable probability to be a 'yes' (because even if the price doesn't increase to, say, 40x what it is now, I still can theoretically take advantage of price volatility due to slippage and others' speculations and come up with a reasonable 40x in over a decade).
Emotional energy, yes I'd have to agree that the speculative value of money defined above combined with the additional speculative value of time would manifest in often complex emotions. Most often being shared as frustration, something which I'm admittedly very susceptible to.
I'll agree with you in that IMO it's mostly dissonance that we speculate on. My value of time changes, because some of the time I think I'll make more income and some of the time I think I'll make less income. My value of money changes because sometimes I think that my interest rates will go up and some times I think they will go down, if I'm in an agreed on variable interest loan.
I'd argue that emotions are inherently based on cognitive dissonance, so no real discussion there.