Fake Books
One of the things that has kept me out of the cryptocurrency space is that when their advocates discuss value, they speak in pure nonsense.<p>A big part of that problem is that value is very difficult to discuss. On the one hand you have the classic goldbug that insists that gold has "intrinsic value", which is some sort of platonic ideal thing that gold simply ambiently has and defies any attempt to nail down what it grounds out in. On the other hand you have cryptocurrency advocates claiming that all value is arbitrary and/or based entirely on scarcity. In that context, observing that my kid's doodles are scarce but not valuable is not a cute tweet; it is a complete and utter demolishing of the argument.<p>(I think one of the things education can accidentally (mis)teach is that short arguments are always worthless and arguments must always be long. This is false. A good grounding in mathematics can help with internalizing this. It is completely possible to demolish entire massive argument edifices in 10-20 of the correct words, and the fact that the "other side" has deployed literally hundreds of thousands of words does not make them right if the foundation is rotten.)<p>Value is intrinsically a dynamic process. It grounds out in human desires, which are intrinsically temporal, variable, and fickle, and this makes a <i>lot</i> of people uncomfortable as they seek either a more solid <i>or</i> a more completely ethereal/arbitrary base. However, there is no other sensible way to think about value, however complex and ever-shifting this may be, and it is neither mathematically solid, nor an amorphous vapor of no consequence subject to one strong person's Nietzschian will.