Quote from: porc on December 10, 2013, 09:12:05 AM

1) You already assume that the person holding something will accept nothing in return and thus say that nothing is something because it can be exchanged for something...

No I reject your premise that bitcoin is "nothing". The problem I have with your argument is that you begin it with the assumption that for money to be something (have "value") it must have useful, valued traits outside of being money. It's this assumption I'd like to debate, not all the conclusions you arrive at after that assumption is made.

As I said, as I understand it, the regression theorem requires any potential thing to have value to people outside of being money for it to become valued as money in the future. This would be a great argument, pre-bitcoin adoption, as to why bitcoin would never grow to function as money. Now that bitcoin exists and has grown to be used as money at least in some limited capacity, we have some empirical evidence that contradicts the deductions made by Mises to create this theorem.

So let's step back the discussion and hear anything you have that explains why money must have be valued for traits outside of being money to have value as money. The best I've heard you come up with so far is that you trust the longevity of physical traits more than you do virtual ones, but that sounds like more your problem than a problem with bitcoin itself. Others with your line of thinking have and will likely continue to slow Bitcoin's rate of adoption and growth (by not adopting it due this dogmatic belief), but I don't see it invalidating all the value placed on it by others.

It appears to come down to you feeling more comfortable with a money that possesses a long-standing physical trait that is valued that you believe should give your money a psuedo floor price in case of speculative value collapse. You are free to value an oz of Gold that has a fraction of it's price very unlikely to go away due to a "utility" value trait more than an amount of bitcoin with equal exchange price, but that doesn't mean they are fundamentally different actors as money to those that use them.

Isn't the assertion that, bitcoin has no value because money must have value outside of being money to have value and bitcoin doesn't have value outside of being money, circular reasoning?

Quote from: Ibian on December 10, 2013, 08:57:33 AM

Why do we keep having these tiresome back and forths on what value is? There is nobody who owns bitcoin who doesn't value it. Let's let that be the end of it.

I have no doubt that there have been countless variations of this back and forth already in this sub-forum, however I've very rarely read much from here and I'm fascinated by porc's position. He's not the only one that thinks this way and I'm curious to flesh out how he comes to his conclusions since they are a quite popular with a large section of investors and differ so grossly from my own thoughts. Sometimes it's formally making the argument you believe in that leads you to realize your position isn't as strong as you thought it was and potentially change how you think. Sorry to bore you.