Quote from: johnyj on May 04, 2014, 02:51:16 AM

Quote from: Melbustus on May 04, 2014, 01:18:25 AM

No. Utility "backs" bitcoin. Things have value because they're useful in some context. Bitcoin is a tool to reduce the friction of exchange. It happens to work very well for that in our modern internet-centric global instant era. We call such a thing money, or currency.

A couple hundred years ago, gold and silver did that very well. They had properties (scarcity, fungibility, recognizability, durability, divisibility, etc) that made them generally work better than anything else for the purposes of reducing the friction of exchange.

What "backed" gold and silver? The only thing that gave them value was their utility. And so it is, should be, and will continue to be, with bitcoin.

Value is not coming from utility, but decided by supply/demand. Utility is only one of the prerequisites for demand, but if the supply is endless, then it will not have value. Email can have great utility but it has almost no value, since it can be duplicated endlessly. Litecoin's utility is as good as bitcoin, but it does not hold 1/20 of bitcoin's value

The value of gold and silver is also backed by supply/demand. If you mass dump all the gold reserves from central banks, the price will crash hard. Today, everything's value is more or less decided by its value on exchanges

Litecoin does not have the same utility as Bitcoin because of the simple reason that you can pay / receive payments from a lot more people with the latter. Ultimately any market price depends of supply and demand, but the day we can send/recive/pay most people/companies with Bitcoin is the day we will have stable (and high) prices. Bitcoin will then have higher utility than Visa, PayPal, Western Union, SWIFT etc.