Ohh water is only ‘situationally’ valuable. Like in basically every situation where there is life you mean? Other than that sure, useless
Discussion
you would be able to sell me gold or bitcoin if i find the price right. try selling me water, lol! even if potable water is more scarce than otherwise it still has no value to speak of. no liquid market on a personal level.
I can’t be bothered trying to explain it anymore so maybe ai can:
What he’s missing is the difference between market price/liquidity and intrinsic or situational value. He’s conflating “value” with “tradable commodity on a market.” A few points:
1. Value isn’t only economic.
Water has enormous value in survival terms, even if there’s no one to sell it to you personally. If you’re stranded without water, its worth is infinite relative to your life; the market is irrelevant. Bitcoin and gold may have a price, but that price means nothing if they can’t sustain you physically or psychologically in the moment.
2. Liquidity ≠ inherent value.
Just because something is hard to trade or lacks a market doesn’t make it valueless. Scarcity in a market context doesn’t generate intrinsic worth; it just allows pricing to happen.
3. Situational vs absolute value.
He’s dismissing water because he’s imagining a situation where he can’t sell it. But value is highly context-dependent — to a thirsty human, water’s value is immediate and undeniable, regardless of markets. Scarcity alone does not create value; need does.
4. Human perception and utility matter.
Value is tied to utility and desire, not just scarcity. Water’s utility is life-sustaining; Bitcoin’s is trust, speculation, or medium of exchange. He’s blind to the distinction between “can I sell this” and “can I survive without it.”
In short: he’s thinking like a trader, not a human being. Scarcity alone doesn’t produce value; utility, desire, and consequences do.
how is that any different from what i said?
"so everything you listed only has value because others decide to want it and they have relative scarcity?"
is not contradicted by
"Value is tied to utility and desire, not just scarcity."
also
"Liquidity ≠ inherent value"
nobody claimed that. my actual claim was without scarcity, there is no value to speak of. it's true that price is a proxy for value. it's also true that values is subjective and situational.
Because you’re saying you need scarcity to have value and it’s saying you don’t, dipshit
no. you just need to learn to read.
Dipshit isn’t a language I’m going to learn
I’ve reread this thread and maybe I have misunderstood what you’re saying. The original poster was saying that bitcoin has value because it has intrinsic value in that it serves as a means of communication of value. Maybe you can say whether you agree with that or not.
i think "intrinsic value" is kinda bs. aside from subjectivity, in aggregate, we hold things valuable that are useful and not abundant. it really boils down to supply and demand.
i don't disagree with the idea that bitcoin is a network good tho. it offers more utility the more people adopt it, however this is logarithmic.
I think I see what you’re trying to do now. You’re basically saying that ‘intrinsic’ value is meaningless, and if something is scarce and in demand, it will have value. If it is truly scarce and lots of people want it, it will be really valuable, maybe infinitely so.
Ok, so let’s say you’re correct. And let’s apply this to bitcoin. It’s scarce (21m) and lots of people want it. So it must always go up. And when people have it they’ll continue to want it. Why? Because other people want it, who will pay for it, because they want it. So the people who have it just have to convince others to want what they have, but not sell what they have, which will work because others want it..
Can you see the circular logic of this?
for the record, i don't think it ill always go up. i don't think it's valuation works as it should have anymore.
but i do think that bitcoin is not like physical stuff. for example i would not want 1000 barrels of oil delivered to my door, but i would always accept a 1000 btc if someone wants to send it to me. there is no cap on what a single person can conveniently hold. it's very special in that sense.
No it isn’t. Anyone can mint a crypto and hold an infinite amount
sure. bitcoin was the first such asset. and still the most relevant. but that's coming to an end because people went full retard and forgot why bitcoin was made in the first place.
also we already discussed that there is no value in stuff that is in infinite supply. you can make up your own bullshit, but you can't just conjure more bitcoin into existence and can't just create an advantage to yourself by printing your own money. that's why it was a schelling point.
at least that was true before the paper bitcoin era. once people start to hold "bitcoin" on their bank accounts (few years tops) the banks will just make those numbers up like they did with everything. KYC/AML regulation will make sure you can only send from walled garden to walled garden which will quickly devolve into cheaper "off-chain" offerings. then bitcoin scarcity becomes a joke. the writing is on the wall.
it already failed to appreciate in real terms (or against gold) for an entire cycle. the simple reason is that people are not buying bitcoin anymore, they are buying paper and weird ponzinomic affinity scams.
Exactly. It had some value as peer to peer cash while the fees stayed low (and before other crypto did it better, eg bitcoin cash). But after that, well people didn’t want to say, well we have all this hash power supporting an inferior exchange of value, so maybe we can sell it as a store of value. But a store of what value? Its only value was as an exchange, so if you remove that, it has none. Or rather it has the value people have been convinced to believe it has. And clearly humans are pretty susceptible to extraordinary claims without any actual evidence. So the narrative works for ages. But not forever.
i think #bitcoin would still be fine with the speculation / shared hallucination about it's value. if it could hang on to it's supply cap.
it would protect your purchasing power against real inflation, and it would provide an opt-out from the consequences of fiscal and monetary policy.
but bitcoin in a high -trust environment (white markets) loses all of it's cherished properties. including the scarcity! bitcoin only makes sense as a low-trust (supra-legal) system.
in the absence of large, liquid, established gray or black markets and circular economies that insist on final settlement on-chain and provide independent price discovery, at bifurcation the massive power advantage goes to the regulators and their enforcers, the financial institutions.