Quote from: crabel on February 20, 2013, 03:00:59 AM

There is no such thing as intrinsic value.

No there isn't, but this is not the same thing as saying a society of humans couldn't possibly agree on a set of economic rules that assumes things have intrinsic value and that ends up serving them well according to their expectations.
But I digress. (Your mistakes as a Mises-ian will be many more than I have time to point out and correct so I better give up on that type of reply right now.)

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Value is determined as part of the economic calculation and it is always measured relative to something.

This says nothing about what makes a currency system better than others. I will tell you what makes a currency better than others (better than fiat and better than Bitcoin): it should have little or no deflation or inflation; and if it does these phenomena should only affect the people responsible for them and not also everyone else.

Grignon's Digital Coin system has these properties, unlike Bitcoin: the producers of goods and services are also the issuers of specific types of digital coin with which those goods and services can be bought. Therefore, all coin in circulation is always backed by real values available to be transacted on the market. Therefore, if a producer/issuer makes any calculation mistakes and issues too much or too little of their own coin relative to how much product they make available to be bought with it, the ensuing inflation or deflation will only affect them and not the whole economy. Two major problems solved right there. Bitcoin doesn't touch either of these.

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So where you might ask did the initial value of the bitcoin come from. It came when Satoshi expended the first electron to decrypt the very first block (not counting his work in developing and testing bitcoin).

That looks kinda like a circular definition: Bitcoin has value because effort was spent doing something that creates trust in the Bitcoin system. It's almost as bad as fiat currency. Coins should have value because they're backed by real values available to be exchanged for it on the market - that's healthy currency, not any of these other distorted systems based on little more than mental gymnastics.

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I like converting the value of a currency into the amount of primary energy that it purchases.

I would like that too, but unfortunately you can't convert human expectations into energy units, so in a perfectly rational monetary system you will probably need at least two different types of currency that cannot be converted into eachother: one that reflects the physical properties of the goods being traded (and prices in this currency cannot be subject to the laws of the free market but must be established by extremely rigorous and precise calculations based on the laws of physics) and another that reflects all the human subjective factors that go into establishing "value" (and prices in this currency can be subject to free market phenomena, no problem).
But we digress again.

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So "the joint" please refrain from denigrating bitcoin. You do not have a logically defensible position.

Yes I do, see above. Bitcoin is not backed by real values on the market any more than fiat currency is and when someone or something causes inflation/deflation in Bitcoin, that affects everyone at the same time, even people who weren't at fault. Grignon's Digital Coin system is clearly better, as it solves these two major problems.

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If you doubt its value, don't trade in it.

I don't doublt its "value" as expressed in $ and while it still has that I will probably continue to trade in it - for purely speculative reasons. What I doubt is its "value" in the long term, its "value" as a monetary system.

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If you are trading in it then you don't even believe your own gas, because your act of trading is adding value to bitcoin.

No it's not. Speculation adds to instability, which lowers Bitcoin's "value" as a monetary system. All I'm doing is speculating - I want to see Bitcoin crash and burn ASAP (and get a little richer while I'm at it, if possible).