“Value” is an interesting thing.
We say something “has value” and financial experts refer to certain assets as being “stores of value.” Here on Hive, we talk about the value of our Hive token, and we consider whether or not someone's content "adds value."
We talk about “value” like it’s a tangible thing… and we do have tangible stores of value like gold, silver and other precious metals... and people like to point to those.
But even that is a bit dodgy because what is gold and silver, apart from kinda pretty shiny metals you can make jewelry and trinkets out of? You can't eat them, you can't start fires with them, you can't fertilize your garden with them...so they are ultimately not really USEFUL, pragmatically speaking.
And so, we arrive at this strange realization that “value” is really an intangible and invisible thing.
When people find out that I am (at least peripherally) involved in cryptocurrencies, they often comment things like “Ah yes, that’s that INVISIBLE money.”
Maybe it’s simply part and parcel of human nature that we expect “things” to be tangible and visible. Subsequently, we tend to assign more value to the tangible and visible — on some very basic level — and assigning value to the invisible basically represents a leap of faith.
But let’s be real here: a piece of 400-year old canvas with some paint on it has very little tangible value… you might be able to burn it and start a fire with it, but some twigs and straw probably make for better and more functional kindling. And yet? We come to an agreement that “This was painted by Rembrandt!” and suddenly that old piece of canvas has a value of $10 million.
When I point that out to critics of cryptocurrency, it’s really not that much of a stretch to argue that a bunch of computer calculations known as Bitcoin also “have value.”
That’s what makes “value” so interesting.
Although we tend to look at it like it were “a thing,” value is actually not a thing. It’s pretty much 100% perception. Value is merely an agreement between multiple parties that something has… well… value.
And sometimes that agreement falls apart. I may hold in my hand a $100 billion bill — as people in Zimbabwe once did — but the large number is in no way related to the actual value. The same can be said for certain periods in Germany and Hungary, and more recently Venezuela.
Part of what makes value so fluid and fickle is the fact that there’s always the “human factor” to mess things up. If you truly drill down to the bottom of things, there is no real answer to “what has value?” in the universal sense of the word, there’s only a possible answer to “What has value… to YOU?”
And even that can be a very difficult question to answer!
Some people will give their left nut to have a new Mercedes, but “a new Mercedes” has no more value to me than our 1997 Nissan Maxima. In fact it potentially has less value because I can afford to maintain the Nissan, but I can’t afford to keep a Mercedes running, let alone registered and insured.
Hence we end up with the question concerning reliable stores of value… which perhaps allows me to sell the Mercedes to someone for whom it does have value, keep the old Nissan and put the difference into something that does have value to me, like a much-needed roof repair and a new whole house heater, and maybe some more seeds and gardening supplies.
But that's just my impression of value... what's yours?
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Posted with proof of brain
