the blockchain nerds like to talk about the "intrinsic value" of their blockchain thingummies, in comparison to the purported worthlessness of conventional currencies. dollars, euros, roubles, &c. are (so they say) "fiat money"—regarded as having value only because governments arbitrarily declare them to have value. what if those governments collapse? what if they lose their authority to proclaim that "fiat money" has value? then your dollars &c. are worthless! this ostensible unreliability of mere "fiat money" doesn't prevent cryptobros from hoarding as much "fiat money" as they can grab, but...well, let's just move on.
I'm guessing there's a substantial overlap between the blockchain gamblers and the older-fashioned crowd of grifters who for many decades have been touting the virtues of "sound money", i.e. money backed up by precious metals. the "noble metals", silver and gold especially, still exert a powerful allure. they are seen as stores of "intrinsic value", whereas by contrast the worthless "fiat money" of modern governments who abandoned the practice of backing up their currencies with precious metals is sustained only by empty promises—that, in sum, is how the gold-obsessed "sound money" people see the matter. it seems ridiculous to me that blockchain blocks, chunks of cryptographic noise containing almost no useful information at all, have been slotted into the role of "intrinsically valuable" assets for supporting "sound money" in the same way as precious metals, but...well, that's what's happened.
does gold have "intrinsic value"? my first inclination is to answer "yes", because gold has unique physical and chemical properties that make it useful for currency and—here's the key point, I think—make the stuff very difficult to fake and to destroy. dissolving a hunk of gold metal in acid (or cyanide) doesn't destroy its value, for it's a relatively simple matter to recover the metal from the solution, almost without loss. the physical properties of gold metal—its great density, its thermal and electrical conductivity, its heat capacity, even its color—are practically impossible to duplicate with some cheap substitute. simple tests that practically anyone can carry out suffice to tell apart a lump of solid gold from (say) a gilded hunk of lead or tungsten. alloying gold with base metals may produce cheaper alloys that still look golden at first glance, but streaking them on a touchstone (a black fine-grained stone) tells them apart from pure gold. and so on. if you want to declare that a piece of metal has some sort of permanent value of monetary exchange, then it's difficult to do better than gold.
but this notion of "intrinsic value" founders on a basic truth: no free person is obliged to accept a piece of gold in exchange for anything.
(cont'd)
in all this chatter about "value" and whether anything can have "intrinsic value" as a medium of exchange, there's a central point to be made: money and its value come pretty close to be completely "fake". that is to say, no matter whether it's U.S. dollars or Russian roubles or blockchain gimcracks from cryptocurrency scamsters, the value of money is almost wholly determined by mutual social agreement and nothing else. all the elaborate technical complications that blockchain geeks build into their systems for "minting" blockchain gimmicks may be useful for building trust in a given gimmick, but only within the limited subculture of people who accept the premise of blockchain currency. people outside that subculture don't see anything worth trusting, not when it seems as though cryptobros are perpetually trying to rob each other and break their promises; the intricacy of the technology does nothing to protect cryptocurrency gamblers from being cheated. but as long as there's enough true believers in these systems they have "value", and such "value" doesn't need to last very long in order for the cryptocurrency to be useful as long as the money is kept moving.
and all the while it's gaining "value" of another sort—speculative value, gambling value, for the chief means in capitalism for "creating wealth" is gambling on the future. capitalists are always bidding up the "values" of their corporations and their portfolios; venture is piled upon venture, and if you're sufficiently privileged you'll always find someone willing to bet on you no matter how many failures and frauds you've racked up. the speculative nature of capitalist "value" applies to everything that capitalists gamble on, whether it's land or metals or new inventions, but it seems to go double and treble for blockchain stuff. the flimsiness of the premise of "intrinsic value" in blockchain thingummies seems, paradoxically, to increase their worth in the eyes of speculators. sure, it's possible to gamble on solid things like gold or soybeans or racehorses, but that very solidity is a restraint on their speculative "value". such things can't be bid up into the stratosphere, whereas blockchain stuff and other fata morgana of business technology seem like they might pay off a million to one if you're lucky.
and people, wealthy and important people, do still gamble on this stuff. I perceive that there's some wishful inclination to regard blockchain and cryptocurrency as passé fads, humiliated and destroyed by Dan Olson &c. and supplanted by newer fads, but take a look at any big-name finance publication online and search for "blockchain" or "cryptocurrency" or related terms: this stuff is still big news for money-seekers, and capitalists have not given up even on NFTs. the furor and bad press has killed the faddishness of blockchain speculation, but that's only convinced the capitalists that they need to be more careful and insidious in exploiting the stuff. for the promise of blockchain currencies is surely as fundamentally appealing as such promises come: it's the dream of "creating" money with zero effort on the part of the speculator, simply from running an elaborate machine nonstop. the promise of "AI" is similar but the blockchain promise is far more direct. it's one thing to push some "AI" generated gibberish into someone's hands and insist, "this is good writing." but it's quite another to push a blockchain-generated token onto someone and say, "this is money. this is your pay. take it or leave it."
the runaway falsity of the whole scheme, the piling-up of dubious claims of "value" and "wealth creation", seems to indicate an underlying motivation: it's like people dimly sense that "money" and "wealth" have arbitrary and socially-assigned values, and therefore it simply ought to be possible for any person to make themselves wealthy by fiddling with a few figures. there's more than a little doublethink involved in trying to claim that you're somehow a "creator" of wealth, indeed the only sort of creator who matters, by heaping up large amounts of currency in one's bank-books—while at the same time harping on how "fiat money" has purely arbitrary value that might vanish at any moment. I'm reminded of how many chasers of "wealth" insist over and over again that they're not in it for the money and have taught themselves litanies of platitudes about the futility of avarice, even though their lives are largely devoted to elaborate schemes for making quantities of money go upwards and upwards.
money is both a worthless thing, and the only thing. why do people still clutch so firmly to this contradiction?
the answer is simple: money, or the lack of money rather, is equivalent to sin.
~Chara of Pnictogen
