Quote from: deisik on December 18, 2013, 08:04:10 PM

Quote from: Erdogan on December 18, 2013, 07:35:35 PM

Quote from: deisik on December 18, 2013, 09:17:37 AM

I can't accept your reasoning as convincing. We started with some abstract property of gold being purely subjective (i.e. prettiness to the eye) which you called its direct use, and now you turn to saying that we are concerned with what is the value of one dollar, one ounce of gold or one bitcoin. Then you say that the system itself, not the actual coins, is extremely valuable, but can't I say absolutely the same about gold, i.e. gold "system" being highly valuable for its properties, not actual coins? And now you implicitly suppose (not pronouncing it since it would sound too false) that security, anonymity and whatnot of actual bitcoins can't be direct use value for their owners. I am using you logic here, and nothing beyond it, and you suddenly stop using it in respect to bitcoins...

How come really?

The system, and the actual money, are two different things.

Actually, I want you to address the following points. Firstly, if you call gold's prettiness direct use value, I'd like to know how it concerns with what is the value of one ounce of gold.

The prettyness is useful for you the owner of the gold. Direct use. Even if you don't fancy it yourself, you wear it because others think it is pretty or otherwise awsome, it is still use value. For the baerer, the use value in that case is to have the admiration. (To clarify my ealier "fringe" comment).

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Secondly, you say that it is the bitcoin system itself which is extremely valuable, but I was talking about properties that are related to individual bitcoins as well. If so, why we can't them consider as direct use value like we do in the case of gold's prettiness? If you disagree with that, please provide come convincing reasoning as to why they should be considered only on a system level, meaning they are inapplicable on a per coin basis.

You could probably find a small use value also in bitcoin. I can only think of bragging rights for having mined a large number of coins. I am not so sure about the Casascius coins. They have the looks, and are at the same time bitcoins. What do you think?

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And thirdly, explain why then we can't consider gold properties in the same way as you propose we should do in the case of bitcoin properties?

I think we can. Bitcoins could be compared to gold, and the bitcoin system could be compared to the gold system.

So basically, I don't think we are very much in disagreement.