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Comment by akaij | Hacker News Reader

Things have value because we say so. How else can you explain the worth of a $100 banknote being higher than the paper and the ink it's made of? Bitcoin is the same.

All money is make-believe.

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It's not quite so simple. Government backed money has some intrinsic value because if you don't have any the government will put you in jail for not paying taxes. The IRS does not accept crypto.

You can also get into "everything is make believe" easily enough, so this isn't very helpful either way.

The IRS does not accept cash either. And the process of converting your cash into bits that the IRS accepts ends up being the same process as converting your crypto into bits that the IRS accepts.

I don't even think you actually believe this. It's conceivable that bitcoins value could someday be worthless. Dollars will never be worthless until the US government collapses because you will always nened them to stay out of jail.

If you think of Dollars as "get out of US jail" cards it's pretty easy to see how they have intrinsic value.

You also can't pay taxes with US$ in most countries outside the US. They only accept local currency.

The IRS not accepting cryptocurrencies is irrelevant; you can take a look at any trading platform and find that there are people, right now, willing to part with more than 49000 of their "government backed US dollars with their intrinsic value and ability to pay taxes" to acquire a single bitcoin.

You are right, $100 have value because people have an agreement that it does. This is not the case for Bitcoin… there are folks who wish it were. It’s like saying “from today on, I can buy stuff with emojis”. Even Monopoly money go back in the box at the end of the day.

A quick glance at any exchange disproves this. The common agreement right now is that a single Bitcoin has ~$50000 value.

Things have value because they help, or at least don't hinder, the reproduction of society.

I don't follow. Can you elaborate?

It's an evolutionary argument. A society that produces the kind of people who value harmful or useless things is not tenable, so societies tend to produce the kinds of people who value helpful things. In the long run, this tendancy is absolute.

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