Quote from: Silberman on September 25, 2021, 07:37:34 PM

Quote from: jaysabi on September 23, 2021, 06:31:40 PM

But now you've given an example of gold's intrinsic value- use in jewelry. The value comes from it's intrinsic properties; not people speculating on it's value, but actual use. That's not where bitcoin's value comes from, nor NFTs. In both cases, that value comes exclusively from speculation on the future value of them, based solely on a mass assumption of future worth. To differentiate, gold as a store of value is completely arbitrary, just like bitcoin. But gold still has a demand outside of store of value (the intrinsic value of gold) and bitcoin and NFTs do not. That's the difference between bitcoin and gold and why there's no difference between bitcoin and NFTs.

The value of bitcoin comes from the network effect and it is described in the Metcalfe’s law, as an example if you had a telephone that could only call your own number then that network is useless as you are the only member of it, but if the network has millions and millions of numbers you can call then the network becomes very valuable due to its size, this is why social networks like Facebook and others have value and it is the reason bitcoin has value as well.

I don't believe this is applicable at all. Relatively no one uses bitcoin as a currency, so the network effect of a currency that no one is actually interested in using as a currency isn't applicable. Bitcoin's real-life use case (not the theoretical one as a currency) is in speculative trading, and the primary driver of that is a good economic environment so people are confident enough to gamble on a speculative asset and excess capital to do so. This is why you see bitcoin drop so harshly when there is bad macro economic news. If the value wasn't tied specifically to speculation and was indeed a function of Metcalfe's law, you wouldn't see the price correlated so closely to macro economic trends.