Gib what do you mean by no inherent value? It's a physical commodity that has intrinsic value.
Bitcoin is like all currency it's value is based on the "gold standard". I get your point that nothing has real value unless man puts value behind it, but gold has value because of its scarcity (much like bitcoin).
Again kudos on your windfall.
You have $30 million in the bank and you didn't wait out bitcoin coming back up?
Thanks man - I explained (around 200+ posts back why I sold most of my BTC) - I still have a single coin that I will keep for life and some "small change" - also some ETH and BCC. I think BTC does have potential for a good long term future and I will rebuy at some point - but I became uncomfortable with the speed of the recent rise, and then the correction. I don't like losing money, so locked in the gains (which in hindsight turned out well). So even though I could afford to lose the lot, I don't like losing! But again, I do think its worth holding some long term, for many reasons.
In terms of value, there are some commodities that have a value that truley reflect their use in terms of both production cost and end-user consumption (eg iron, copper, coffee, pork bellies etc). Even with these there is some amount of speculative value, but that relates more to predictions of how demand and production costs will be affected by various factors. With gold (and BTC by the way), there is both a production cost and there is a utility for both too (gold is used in some electronic devices for example, and BTC is used for transactions) - but in both cases their value far far exceeds their true value based on actual use. Both gold and BTC's values are by a very large factor based on a collective agreement among a group of people to attribute a value to them as a store of value, based primarily on scarcity, among other factors. And that value, is entirely subjective and detached from actual use value - so BTC (and gold for that matter) are basically impossible to value. They best metric I would use as an investor of in them would be to try to predict the direction of the relevant portion of potential buyers perceptions and demand for them. I believe that there is a possibility that the infrastructure and philosophy around the new (usually young generation of crypto buyers) may eventually come around full circle and generate a new generation of people also interested in gold (and perhaps most importantly this new generation is fully plugged in to social media, which can help to very quickly create demand in an exponential way, for a new asset class..
OK - long rant - gotta go - hope that helps!
