I think the grounding question is a big part of it, but there's a related class of precarity that's easier to talk about.

People always share that chart originally done by Vijay about how btc is better than gold in every way except for not having been around for three millennia. I think that's such cope.

Like, there is nothing that humankind can realistically do (James Bond movies aside) to ruin gold. It exists in the physical world, and nothing is required for it to continue in its role as a perfect ledger, instantiated in physical reality. Its POW was when the universe got created, now it need merely continue to exist. You can drop it into the bottom of the ocean for 400 years and it can be unearthed later, as good a SoV as ever. Its role as a perfect ledger could be ruined if we somehow found some massive motherlode of it in the center of the Earth or on an asteroid or something. But that's it. It cannot be vaporized if you get a head injury.

Btc is the ideal money. Or: the Ideal money. It is pure money-ness and nothing else, the abstraction rendered pure. But a pure abstraction is a dangerous thing. Or at least, so it seems to me. There are so few examples in the real world of a pure social abstraction that it's hard to tell. My best thinking at this point is to wrestle with this by making a very concrete functional argument:

a: value of pure money-ness b: btc's foreignness and annoying idiosyncrasies and weaknesses, e.g., scaling c: value of fiat money-ness d: value of gold and commodity monies' money-ness

After all the noise shakes out, this seems the heart of it. So what do we get? It seems like a is a big number, and probably growing due to the nature of online life, the rise of AI, etc; and both b and c are shrinking while d is growing, although less fast than a.

So maybe it's fine. But apropos of our recent discussion on another topic, this to me is one that could benefit from really drilling into.

PS: going dark for a week, don't feel ignored if you respond and I don't.

I think a person's value assignment to bitcoin can certainly be grounded in ideals, and the more "ideal" something is, the more likely it is that many people will find value in it.

But I also think our own understanding of what is ideal is shaped by the people around us. So if everyone around us stops believing in something, it might be harder for us to maintain that belief in contradistinction to those around us.

Lastly, we can consider a thought experiment of what happens if only one person in the world assigns any intrinsic value to Bitcoin. Then, that person would probably own every Bitcoin, and there wouldn't be a market price for Bitcoin because it won't be traded. For all intents and purposes, it would be the "bitcoin goes to zero" scenario. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't hold value for at least one person out there, and the value may be revived once again if someone else decides to assign value to it as well.