Quote from: FreeMoney on August 13, 2010, 09:56:14 PM

You have a utity-o-meter?

Yes, an educated mind.

Quote

You are sure I get 0 utility from having bitcoins? Your meter is broken.

The utility that I get from bitcoins, or from US dollars or Euros, is only in what I can trade them for. They have no 'intrinsic' utility. Not for me, and not for anyone else. Feel free to try and come up with a use for currencies outside of their monetary trade uses.

The Romans used many things as money, besides gold and silver. More popular than either of the traditional metals were salt and iron nails. It should be obvious enough that both of those have utility beyond their uses as a medium of exchange.

As an aside, that is where we get the convention of sizing nails in "pennies" even though the actual metric is denoted in a small letter "d". It was originally measured in 'denarius', the *official" standard silver coin of the Roman empire. That alone should give one a clue as to how highly valued a simple iron nail was to the common Roman, since a normal nail for home construction is called a "16 penny"; and a man named Jesus from Nazarath was betrayed for 30 denarius, significantly less than the value of the three large nails used to pin that man to a dead tree.

I think that a great many people on this list would benefit from a book called, "Whatever Happened to Penny Candy?" by Ray Bradbury.