veen passed me a book on Ethereum that I deleted by accident and then read and deleted on purpose in which there's a whitepaper that I read and promptly forgot which it was which is too bad because it puts forth a fundamental concept:

valuables are any objects that demonstrably represent expertise over time.

By this argument, ornate jewelry represents "value" in the following ways:

- the time expended in mining and refining precious metals

- the time expended in mining and faceting any gemstones

- the time expended in crafting the piece

- the time expended in any additional ornamentation

So while the effort put into this:

Is orders of magnitude more than the effort put into this:

The "value" of the Automate Fee Ondine is orders of magnitude higher than the iPhone 8 because the former represents years of individual labor by a handful of skilled artisans as opposed to moments of collective labor by a pool of thousands of pieceworkers.

It kinda throws the proposition of "gold" into question: I guess something like 80% of all the gold ever mined has been mined in the past 100 years. The time value proposition of gold is very different now than it was then, yet the price is stupid high.

And it justifies the "crypto" behind cryptocurrency: it took the computer this long to crack the nut and win the coin. The point is that cryptocurrency mining rates are governed by time not number. The inherent value in cryptocurrency is the hash rate, not the exchange, because the exchange (as demonstrated by this piece) is meaningless when half of it is fiat.

So the title isn't wrong - fiat money is "worthless" if by "worthless" we mean "does not have any inherent value." Bitcoin is "worthless" if you don't value the clock time of the ASICs doing the hashing, just like my friend the Fee Ondine is "worthless" if you don't value the clock time of goldsmiths and gemcutters.

I've taken to explaining Ethereum as an investment in future clock time on a massively distributed mainframe. That mainframe may not be doing a lot at the moment but one need not be a student of computer science to hypothesize that it may prove useful.