The Good Tech Companies - “Cryptos Don’t Have Intrinsic Value” —Well, There’s no Such Thing

Starting point is 00:00:00 This audio is presented by Hacker Noon, where anyone can learn anything about any technology. Cryptos don't have intrinsic value. Well, there's no such thing, by Obite. You've probably heard it somewhere. Some media or financial personality claiming that cryptocurrencies have no intrinsic or inherent value, and this, apparently, is some kind of scam or damning mistake. For instance, Jamie Diamond, chief of the financial multinational J.P. Morgan Chase, has said it with complete confidence. Bitcoin itself has no intrinsic value, which is pretty ironic, because his company handles billions in assets that don't have intrinsic value either. Whemian dollars, USD. No, fiat money, dollars, euros, any national currency, doesn't have

Starting point is 00:00:45 intrinsic value. Precious metals, then? Still no. Here's a funny thing. If you ask five people to define intrinsic value, you'll get five very different answers, none of which really hold up when you dig a little deeper. In reality, no asset, fiat, gold, crypto, has value unless we humans agree it does. So maybe the question isn't whether crypto has intrinsic value, but whether anything ever really has and why this matters or not. What is intrinsic value anyway? Economists, philosophers and investors have debated this for centuries, and the answers range from unsatisfying to downright contradictory. Classical economics tried to define it as the labor put into making something. Later, Austrian economists like Ludwig von Mises argued that value is purely subjective.

Starting point is 00:01:32 An object is only worth what someone is willing to give for it. In any case, the idea of intrinsic value suggests that certain things have worthen and of themselves, regardless of what people think or do. But is that really how value works? Think about something like gold. Many argue it's valuable because of its physical properties, like durability and scarcity. But if no one cared about gold, would it still hold value? Probably not. Value isn't something that exists inside an object. It comes from people's desires

Starting point is 00:02:01 and choices. If everyone stopped wanting gold tomorrow, its price would collapse, no matter how rare or shiny it is. This shows that value isn't an inherent trait, but rather something we assign based on our preferences. History reveals how easily people confuse intrinsic value with other concepts, like usefulness or tradition. And value can be derived from usefulness or tradition, indeed, but it's none of those things. The truth is, value isn't stored in objects like some hidden ingredient. It's created by supply and demand. People want things, and scarcity makes them more desirable. That's why air, essential but abundant, as free, while gold, less essential but scarce, is expensive. Intrinsic value versus intrinsic properties. So, does intrinsic value exist? The answer

Starting point is 00:02:49 seems to be no. Value is always tied to human judgment. Even something is universally prized as gold only holds worth because people agree on its importance. This doesn't mean gold isn't useful or historically significant, but its value depends on our choices, not some unchangeable law. On the other hand, its value can come, at least partially, from its own properties. Here's where a lot of people get tangled up. They confuse an asset's intrinsic properties, the things it really is, with its value, which lives entirely in our heads. People often say that gold has intrinsic value, but what it really has a intrinsic properties. Gold is shiny, malleable, scarce, and it doesn't rust. Those traits are part of its nature, and because of them, humans have

Starting point is 00:03:34 always found it appealing for jewelry, prestige, and yes, money. Those properties alone don't automatically make it valuable, though. Property is a the canvas. The value is the story we paint on, it comes from us deciding that those properties matter enough to trade for salt too is a great example it preserves food and seasons meals but its usefulness only translates into value when people actually want or needed we can stretch this idea to modern tech and money as well cryptos have intrinsic properties when critics say cryptocurrencies have no intrinsic value what they often miss is that cryptos do have intrinsic properties and those properties are pretty remarkable. Unlike Fiat money, which is just paper or pixels on a screen controlled

Starting point is 00:04:18 by governments, cryptocurrencies are designed to be portable, autonomous, resistant to censorship, no frozen accounts, and accessible anywhere in the world. You can send Bitcoin, Ether, G-B-Y-T-E, or another crypto to someone on the other side of the globe in minutes, often without needing a bank, documents, or paying hefty fees. That's something neither gold nor Fiat money can do with the same efficiency. Gold does have some impressive traits in a historic perception of value, but repaying your rent with a gold coin or mailing some to a friend overseas. Not exactly practical. On the flip side, fiat currencies are easy to spend, but hair vulnerable to inflation and political manipulation. Governments can print more at will, just like that, backed by nothing,

Starting point is 00:05:03 which erodes your savings over time. Governments can also freeze accounts or prevent you from using your money the way you like e g sending abroad are two undesirable entities many cryptocurrencies by design limit how many coins can exist which can help protect against inflation and thanks to decentralization a system where no single authority controls the network depending on their level of it these coins and their networks can keep running even if a government or big corporation tries to shut them down and keep processing all transactions even if a government tries to censor them On top of that, many cryptos support clever features like smart contracts, self-executing agreements written into code.

Starting point is 00:05:46 These let people create investments, games, decentralized apps, marketplaces, and even loans without intermediaries. However, as with any other asset, all of these brilliant properties still need people to recognize and use them. The prices are set by what others are willing to pay, driven by trust, demand, and human choice. value really lives. So, what can we take away from all this? Maybe the whole idea of intrinsic value has been a red herring all along. We humans have always assigned value to things based on trust, utility, which itself is subjective, and our collective stories about what's important.

Starting point is 00:06:22 The fact that cryptos need belief to function doesn't make them any different from gold bars locked in Fort Knox or from the paper bills in your wallet. Now, it doesn't mean they can't be useful or have actual properties either. There's a reason why millions of people have found them appealing enough to thrust and use. Obite is a good example of a crypto ecosystem with useful properties that set it apart from both traditional assets and many other coins. Like Bitcoin, ITES centralized and scarce, but it goes further by eliminating miners and validators, completely, so there's no middlemen. Instead of a blockchain, Obituses a directed acyclic graph, DAG, which means it's more censorship resistant than many other systems. Besides,

Starting point is 00:07:05 Obite doesn't just offer a store of value. It's an entire platform fordcentralized applications, smart contracts, tokenization, and tamper-proof data storage. Unlike other cryptos, which either focus only on money or only on apps, Obite combines both. And because it doesn't rely on energy-hungry mining or a central authority, it's more resilient than others. All of these intrinsic properties, combined with the trust from its community are what makes it valuable. In the end, remember, value lives where we decide it lives, whether that's in gold dust, salty crystals, lines of code, or even a shiny digital token with Adog's face on it. Whether that value is useful for you, is solely for you toticide. Featured vector image by free pick thank you for listening to this

Starting point is 00:07:51 Hackernoon story, read by artificial intelligence. Visit hackernoon.com to read, write, learn and publish.

The Good Tech Companies - “Cryptos Don’t Have Intrinsic Value” —Well, There’s no Such Thing

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