I love it when people think they’re entitled to an opinion about straight facts. They think that everything can be reverse engineered into oblivion and attacked by their own perspectives whenever they please. News flash fuckheads: you can’t.
Take geometry as an example. The fact that the sum of a triangle’s internal angles is 180º, like any other demonstrable geometric feature, is not an empirical achievement, the result of testing every possible event, or the drawing of a statistical conclusion. It’s a formally verifiable fact, meaning that you apply logic to acquire absolute certainty of a fact from the top down, not the other way around. You can have no idea of what a triangle’s proprieties are, or how it behaves when transformed, or anything else, and still know that a certain fact is true because you have followed a chain of logic that is true in its very nature, and cannot be broken by external factors.
This is how I can prove to anyone that bitcoin has value. It doesn’t simply “work”, the very concept of its existence’s value is a formally verifiable reality, and this is why.
Things have value to individuals. We trade them to obtain other things that have value to us. To make things easier, we find a medium that is always valuable to anyone, so that one side of any trade we like is such medium: this is money. Money only has value because other people will accept it in return for another trade the next time you want to perform one. That’s it. Others will accept it because it cannot be forged [at least in heavily significant amounts], as a unit of money’s value must not be washed out to oblivion, because it is secure, as transaction must be provable, and because it is universal, as they must be able to trade it further on. Bitcoin is generated out of nowhere, exactly like traditional money, and it acquires value in the very fact that individuals like to use it as an exchange medium and make it circulate. It is a deflationary currency, as there’s a fix limit on the number of units that will ever exist, and some will actually get lost along the way. Transactions are mathematically secure, and unless someone finds a flaw in the code [aka the implementation of the math, not the math itself], it will never be vulnerable to error.
I don’t give a fuck about what you, your grandfather, your economics professor, climate change deniers, and pundits think about it. This logic is formally verified start to end, it’s completely above anything you studied in university, algorithms, governments, and interventions. It’s a system that is a non-system by its very nature. It’s a pure idea that is translated into code and can be verified by anyone, without trusting anyone else, in the language of the universe: math.
The fact that bitcoin fits perfectly inside my idea of things is a completely separate aspect, the fact that I like it has absolutely nothing to do with this logic. That’s the beauty of science. And this applies to anything and everything you can think of. Start thinking about things from scratch, from nothing to its current and future forms, from zero to infinity, and you can analyze everything in a formally verified fashion. Ideas you have will always make it hard to get a fully pristine picture of things, but they’ll never make it impossible. Light has nothing to fear from darkness, as darkness is only the absence of light itself.