What's the underlying value of Bitcoin?
People who don't believe in Bitcoin and don't understand the fundamentals of a "A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" usually ask:
"What's the underlying value of Bitcoin?"
And the simple answer to this, is:
There is no underlying value in Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a tool for value exchange.
And to prove this, I am selling some of my artwork for cryptocurrencies (for example: https://steemit.com/art/@nandor/art-for-crypto-where-is-waldo-vi), and if I can sell it, instead of exchanging that cryptocurrency for fiat currency, I will use it to exchange it for value, and post about it here on Steemit.
Because fiat currencies have got no value, they are just a tool for exchanging value as well.
Gold has no value (besides it's industrial use), the imagined value of gold is just a part of our collective hallucination.
The US Dollar has no value, it's the soft- and hard power that the US Government presses on the rest of the world that makes the USD more valuable than the Mongol Tugrik .
true we have a new choice to exchange value without a middleman. But WAIT A MINUTE with Bitcoin we got also a middleman, the miners who put pressure on us the users and force us to pay high fees to keep the blockchain running and today we suffer also from long confirmations.
But there is light on the end of the tunnel in November 2017. Bitcoin is the pioneer in the scene and tries to catch up with the lightning network and Segwit but it seems sometimes ridiciulous to me what happens in the mining camps around the world
animation from giphy.com
Nevertheless we got great opportunities and more and more new contenders arousing our attention for value exchange with low or no transaction fees and many times faster transactions than Bitcoin. But Bitcoin currently has the deep market penetration i think and is already working in the real world others have to prove first.
Love the gif.
Well yes, Bitcoin has some critical flaws by design. And one of it is it's Proof of Work implementation, which does incentivize centralization.
There is a great article about some possible solutions which could still be implemented in time if the developer community would be more cooperating: https://news.21.co/quantifying-decentralization-e39db233c28e
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STOPSo true! Nothing have a "real" value unless someone want's it. We create the value and also the meaning in all things we own, buy, need and in life itself.