Quote from: bshanks on August 08, 2011, 09:39:43 PM

Let's find some sort of intrinsic value that BTC has (besides scarcity or BTC's usefulness as a medium of exchange). This will put a price floor under BTC.

Comments:

I suppose some new service for Bitcoins could increase it's popularity, but I'm not so sure about the ideas presented here.

The main value of Bitcoin is always going to have to be its usefulness as a store of value and a medium of exchange. Otherwise the other services built on top won't have any value.

=== Publishing ===
Probably putting other things in the blockchain would lower the value of Bitcoin instead of increase it. You could have other kinds of blockchains specially made for those purposes.

=== Marked coins ===
I don't think that would work. "My BTC address is XYZ. Any BTC which was has passed thru this address is equivalent to a transferrable IOU for one ounce of gold from me." What happens after the coin is transferred to other people down the line? Those people are not going to honor your commitments.

=== Voting ===
Voting has to be anonymous. If you gave out bitcoins to every voter so they could send them to the ballot account of the candidate of their choice, somebody in theory would know who they gave the original voting coins to and know which account they ended up in. There is no such thing as a "mixer" for Bitcoin addresses if there is a record of every connection in the blockchain.

=== Goods and services which are ONLY buyable with BTC, for set prices ===
Well, if oil was only buyable for bitcoins, yes that would make bitcoins worth something. But there is no way you can do this without government interference - which we don't want.
"if the price of BTC in dollars fell, the game maker would NOT drop the in-game price of items". Then you are forcing him to go broke - which will harm more than help Bitcoin.

=== pseudo-BTC that uses computational power in service of some problem ===
What would be the advantage to this for the customer rather than just buying the computing power on the market?