Quote from: Melbustus on October 01, 2014, 04:13:29 PM

Quote from: cypherdoc on October 01, 2014, 03:51:57 PM

must listen podcast of Robert Murphy by Tom Woods on Bitcoin and the Regression Theorum. it's a little past halfway in the podcast:

http://www.schiffradio.com/pg/jsp/verticals/archive.jsp

Murphy's Conclusions:

1. Bitcoin is unique in that it was developed from the start to be a form of money and did not evolve as a commodity.
2. Bitcoin leapfrogged the barter phase whereby it would have established it's own relative value (intrinsic value) as a commodity in the market place against other items prior to becoming a medium of exchange.
3. the Regression Theorum is too restrictive as it could not have predicted something as innovative as Bitcoin.

i extend his conclusions to say the Jeffrey Tucker's theory that Bitcoin only has value primarily b/c of it's payment network to be wrong. Woods alludes to Tucker's theory in the interview but clearly disagrees with it. Woods makes the correct argument that the reason ppl value the payment network is b/c the Bitcoin currency has value to begin with. IOW, the payment network would be worthless if Bitcoin the currency was worthless. this is where Andreas is also wrong when he says Bitcoin the currency is merely the 1st app existing on what is the real value, the blockchain and that they can be separated. same argument as Tucker's, same wrong conclusion.

also by extension, Konrad Graf's theory that the RT is consistent with Bitcoin's origin is also tenuous, if not wrong, altho not quite as aggregious in its conclusions as Tucker and Andreas. as far as i'm concerned, Mises is a great economist who was right on just about all things except for the fact that his RT did not, and could not, have been expected to have predicted something like Bitcoin which depends on the Internet and a scale of global communication never before seen in human history.

my final conclusion is the same one i've had since i started with Bitcoin back in 2011, and that is that Bitcoin the currency is inextricably linked to Bitcoin the blockchain and Bitcoin the payment network.

Yes, people need to accept the duality of bitcoin's value origination. I don't think it's fair to say that either one originates the value; they both have value because of the other, and are really the same thing: a distributed ledger, which gets us back to money as memory, and bitcoin as an ideal societal memory facilitator. It's perhaps easier to try and think of things separately, because humans like to think linearly, but the reality is that the currency/network should be viewed is a single atomic unit, or two units that can't be separately discussed (which is equivalent and therefore a mostly useless definition).

Playing devil's advocate, for a moment (2nd time today, I just notice)

Not challenging the 'minimum valuation required to perform as medium of exchange' argument. But why can't the ledger be separated from the currency function? For a number of imaginable functions in the future, a minimal share of the supply would be enough to perform the ledger function (e.g. contracts).

In order not to gloss over this: there's still the valuation through required security. If contracts on blockchain have a certain total value, the network needs to be at least protected to make an attack economically unfeasible. Since miners are economically motivated as well, this will provide a security-based minimum valuation of Bitcoin in the process.

Still, the two values need not be the same, so the question remains: why can't the 'ledger' function not be separated from the 'currency/money' function?