I don't see the need to satisfy the regression theorem. With fiat being around as an example for fifty years, people have no problem seeing that a currency without intrinsic value could work. The problem is only to disperse some bitcoins and trigger one exchange. Maybe it was the historic pizza exchange. Mises developed his therories over time, it did not come to him from the gods. Had he lived now, we might have another version.
If you really need it to have intrinsic value, you can anyway not use the cost of production. It has to be a utility value. Bragging power comes to mind. Satisfaction of inventing the thing. Satisfaction of having optimized the mining program. Satisfaction of dreaming about bitcoins as a world currency while sitting in a dark room at night, looking at the hash per second tachometer. Showing a wallet display to your little sister, feeling smarter. Something like that. If anything at all, the utility value of each bitcoin must have been miniscule in the very beginning.
If you really need it to have intrinsic value, you can anyway not use the cost of production. It has to be a utility value. Bragging power comes to mind. Satisfaction of inventing the thing. Satisfaction of having optimized the mining program. Satisfaction of dreaming about bitcoins as a world currency while sitting in a dark room at night, looking at the hash per second tachometer. Showing a wallet display to your little sister, feeling smarter. Something like that. If anything at all, the utility value of each bitcoin must have been miniscule in the very beginning.
I like your two lines of thought.
To put it in experimental terms, the widespread existence and acceptance of fiat money today is a different initial condition versus the starting point for metallic money. And his theorem only applies under the single initial condition where humans have not yet experienced unbacked units of account.
Non-money primitive humans and post-money fiat humans could be thought of as two conceptually different species in terms of their capacity for abstract thought, with previous humans only being able to attach value to physical objects versus current humans who have been conditioned over decades (for better or worse) to accept intangible fiat tokens as valid representations of value.
So let's all thank Nixon for closing the gold window and making Bitcoin possible
