To: Haim R. Branisteanu who wrote (103825 ) 11/29/2013 10:50:28 AM From: Maurice Winn Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 218168 Haim, what's the intrinsic value of those words you wrote?: <The whole issue of Bitcoins is not much different from the Tulip Mania in Holland or any other Ponzi scheme. Some proprietary cyber code package is trading at imaginary prices which otherwise would have no intrinsic value. The only people that will make money out of this mania are those that convert the Bitcoins into tangible assets and those making the specialized computersT > They look like a bunch of black squiggles on white and are generated by a bunch of encoded 0s and 1s, but they purport to represent reality, yet they have no intrinsic value. They are not even worth the paper they aren't written on, nor the ink from which they are not made. Yet, strangely, words are extremely valuable and convey very high value, sometimes extreme value. That value is why people go to such extreme effort to learn the codes for words and then spend so much time looking at them and using them. Bitcoins are also made of 0s and 1s, and represent reality interchanged among people who can use the code. Yet, strangely, they are just a bunch of 0s and 1s with 0 intrinsic value. If your words correctly represent reality, people can use them to avoid losing lots of money, aka their efforts, on a false paradigm. If they do not represent reality, then people "buying" them would miss out on lots of wealth by not setting up a red hot bitcoin mining operation. Things do not need to be actual real things with intrinsic value to be valuable. On the contrary, the most esoteric, arcane, ephemeral and abstract things tend to have the most value. Some paint on some dead cellulose = Mona Lisa Some paint splattered apparently without much design = Jackson Pollock's efforts Some vibrating air molecules = Pie Jesu en.wikipedia.org Some old scrolls, copied and pasted = Torah en.wikipedia.org English language = any number of books and ideas, reports and information Mathematical manipulations of symbols = Fourier transforms which enable mobile Cyberspace Chemical symbols and numbers = production of life saving pharmaceuticals Ideas written on paper describing some method = patents 0s and 1s created using keyboards = Google There is no "there" there, yet people place huge value on those intangible things which are intrinsically worth nothing. Why would you pay $1 for Mona Lisa? But you would. Mqurice