With bitcoin, for quite some time, you will hear it said that it has no intrinsic value and therefore cannot compete with gold or a commodity based money. This speaks to the idea that a good money medium will necessarily have a non-monetary use-case that provides a floor from the value of it falling to zero.
Semantically speaking this is wrong from the Austrian or Libertarian Bitcoiner’s point of view because there is no such thing as intrinsic value in their school of economic thought. Again its simply semantics, but the Austrian school of economics sees all value as subjective and therefore no ‘thing’ has objective value.
But those that argue bitcoin has no intrinsic value are in a sense thinking of a non-locally derived value.
We can think of a concept often referred to in these debates called Gresham’s law that was derived from a story of how Gresham explained to his queen that her wealth left her domain through the debasement of her money medium (ie coins).
Here we are noting the “intrinsic” value of the metal(s) that is/are sent abroad is derived non-locally (that if gold had no desirability locally it would still have value in relation to the cost to exchange for what it is valued for abroad).
Its a semantic point in a sense but its also one of re-solution. We can understand that with the introduction of local versus non-local bounds (ie perspective) something can have a non-locally derived value.
This could be viewed as “intrinsic” value in the sense of the above debate in that it would set a local floor for the value money medium even if there was no local non-monetary usefulness for it.
This might not be a full argument for a floor for the globally held market valuation of bitcoin, however, even if we subscribe to the need for a non-monetary based floor for a reputable money medium it suggests, that a state can’t significantly affect the locally held market valuation of bitcoin by unilaterally banning it-the floor is set non-locally!
