I know what you said about underlying cost and I agree; I'm just telling you that you shouldn't compare gold or the groceries with bitcoin. When it comes to bitcoin, there's no underlying value. It's the demand that determines what the cost will be.

If the whole world adopted it, the demand would rise and so would the difficulty. If suddenly lots of us dumped it, the difficulty would drop as well. It's the difficulty of mining gold that determines its underlying value.

And the minimum market value IS the cost. I just used that term, because you keep saying “cost is not value” and that's confusing. There are lots kinds of values such as personal, market, intrinsic etc.