Just a bit pick, there’s no such thing as intrinsic value. All value is subjective. Gold has strong and common utility aiding in its valuation, but there is no intrinsic value.
The very notion of "intrinsic value" is nonsense. There is no such thing. The "intrinsic value" of a bucket of rice can be enormous if you're starving, and yet it's practically null now. The "intrinsic value" of gold is dependent on one of its extrinsic qualities, rarity (plus another, convention).
Value is just the measure of the willingness of people to give you something in exchange for something else. It's not in the objects themselves, but in the head of the people.
Intrinsic value is highly subjective. Paper money has about 0 (you can burn them for a few seconds, right). Gold has some uses, true, but value is (as someone said above) is simply created by demand. (Gold is worth zero if no one wants to buy gold. Its perceived intrinsic value can disappear (well, most of it) as soon as people stop thinking that its valuable. Of course, its very unlikely to happen, because we're programmed since childhood to think that gold is valuable.
Your definition of "intrinsic value" is clearly different than mine. If no human-assigned value is intrinsic, then nothing has intrinsic value, and your definition becomes non-functional.
When I said that gold coins have intrinsic value (the same is true for copper coins, etc.), I mean that regardless of what nation minted the coin and what value appears on its face, it will always be worth at least its weight in gold.
No commodity has "intrinsic value". It's worth whatever someone else is willing to pay for it. There's nothing intrinsically valuable about gold, for instance. It's worth what it's worth because people believe it will be worth something in the future and are willing to pay a price for it.
A dollar is worth a dollar because a lot of people want it that way. Gold is "worth" 900USD because a lot of people want gold. But not too many people - otherwise the price would rise.
My point is that nothing has intrinsic value. The market parameters of supply, demand and prices are one way we assign value to things.
Gold doesn't have intrinsic value either, except for it's industrial value. Gold's value as a currency is also "only the value we give it in our minds as average of our greed and fear."
At the base of existence, all "true" value is utility value. Before cash and gold coins, people iron stakes and bronze kettles for currency, but even a bronze kettle is useless if you don't use it for cooking soup for your family and village, and instead use it for decorating your home.
I believe you are missing the point I was trying to make.
I was stating that nothing, not even bitcoin or money or gold or water has intrinsic value. Anything can have value to a person who is in need of a seller's goods. That was not my argument. Things have subjective value. Things do not have some mystic intrinsic property that makes them inherently valuable.
Things (shares, companies, objects, currencies, oppurtunities, gold) are worth what people will pay for them. That's it. There is no objective "value" other than that.
There is no such thing as intrinsic value, all value is subjective, only existing if there is a conscious being that can provide a valuation. These beings have shifting, impermanent, prefecerences, and non-uniform preferences. The many factors which affect their considerations also change quite frequently: a glass of water is worth very little when I'm boating across a large pristine lake, yet it is worth an enormous sum as I stumble across a scorched desert.
BTW, the majority of gold's current market price does not stem from industrial/ornamental usage, but a collective "delusion" of monetary value (that has lasted thousands of years). Not to say gold shouldn't have any monetary value, as it is one of most useful materials in that regard. But the intrinsic value argument against bitcoin seems silly to me, given the story of gold.
Gold is shiny, the paper is bendy and has a picture of some dude on it.
In the absence of other people and their ideas of value,
given enough cotton paper I could make clothing or a fire. Given enough gold I could probably make a bludgeoning weapon...
Both have fairly minor value in the absence of shared delusion. And even beyond that, what the hell is 'intrinsic' value? Has the universe decreed that there is a property of matter called 'value'? Like particle spin, or atomic number?
Nothing as any inherent value either though. Gold can't be eaten and food is worth nothing when you just had a feast. Value is a social construction highly dependent on the context.
Most asset classes look like that, though. Gold has some intrinsic value as a good conductor/reflector of heat. But it's not really so very much superior to aluminium or copper or whatever to make it worth what it is worth. It is expensive because it is scarce. That's it. Bitcoin is the same. (They are obviously very different in other ways, but you get the point.)
Things don't need to have intrinsic value to be valuable. They simply need to be desired by the market.
The intrinsic value of EVERYTHING is 0. Things only have value because people want them, not because they have some intrinsic value.
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