Surprisingly, few days later I encountered
this article. Again,
a pos proponent (I suppose) is questioning the value of bitcoin being measurable by the amount of "work" miners do, this time, by directly claiming Marx's theory to be a fallacy!
For the bolded text, I believe this is incorrect as it is heavily implied the author is a bitcoin supporter in the very last line of the article: "Long may [Bitcoin] remain desirable."
Nop, "desirable" is not what a bitcoin supporter says about it. In the context of contemporary PoW/fiat-PoS debate this article is not in support of bitcoin.
It is why I'm becoming more and more convinced that the PoW/PoS debate is nothing less than a final debate between true political economists resurrected after bitcoin on one side and fake mercenary economists with their utilitarian interpretation of value that is incapable of understanding why bitcoin has an inherent value not based on a subjective convention or an artificial demand caused by speculation nor even its usefullness as a medium of exchange and a utility.
On at least two points, I don't believe your association of mining costs to value aligns well with Marx's LTV. Firstly, Marx's LTV is not simply about labor being the defining aspect of a product's price - it is "socially necessary" labor. If the socially necessary constraint were not in place, then by that argument all products' prices would be a function of their labor cost, even when there is zero utility (or socially necessary labor).
I've explicitly quoted Marx the same way, what's your objection here? I just didn't get it.
Secondly, the cost to produce any given bitcoin has varied between roughly $0.00 and $5,000.00 even though they are absolutely identical. The cost to pro, it duce a new bitcoin (loosely) follows the price. I don't believe that this can be explained by Marx's LTV. It can, however, be explained by marginalism.
First of all Marginalism doesn't explain anything. The utility of bitcoin is the same as always but its price is not, the cost is changing due to the changes in social situation so the value has changed and price follows the value. The "loosely" adverb you used is true for all commodities and is aligned wit Marx's theory.
Additionally, there are currencies that do not use PoW and yet still have value. Significant amounts of value. A strong case must be made as to why this value is illusory, but you have not broached it. One could make the counter argument that the existence of these "labor free" currencies invalidates your argument as it appears to prove that there is no socially necessary labor cost. i.e. PoW's popularity is only a preference.
Fiat money is not an ordinary commodity it started pegged to gold and diverged gradually to become what it is now: a scam. PoS issued currencies are the same as fiat currencies in this respect.
Cryptocurrency axiomatically is a movement for offering an objective gold-like alternative money, an store of value-work. All the features of bitcoin are based on this property. Bitcoin is an ordinary commodity, it is not a credit, a debt, a representation of the reputation it is a product of labour, it is why its owner has rights to keep it safe and secure and use it censor free.
This also seems a bit off-topic for D&TD and should probably be in the economics forum.
No it is not. We have a lot of threads and debates in this sub-forum regarding bitcoin energy consumption, we needed a theoretical framework for this issue instead of recycling naive arguments ever and ever.