Ok, some of the confusion is perhaps coming from thinking money is a purely Boolean category, rather than a continuous property.
Hoppe talks about partial moneys (not sure if that was his terminology), which are commodities that take on some monetary characteristics. The Regression Theorem is trying to explain how things get started on the path to becoming money. They had some recognized properties that suggested they might function as a MoE, SoV, or UoA, and began being acquired for those reasons, resulting in a monetary premium. If that monetary premium amplified over time, then the good is considered to be emerging as a money, but it isn't money until it's overwhelmingly used for monetary purposes.
In that sense, those nerds weren't thinking bitcoin was money initially, as the word is used in the Austrian tradition. They may have used the word "money" to describe what they were making, but since there was no monetary use yet, an Austrian would say they had created something that might be able to fulfil monetary functions if people adopted it for such purposes.
a few nerds thinking something is neat
This is just my own framing and why I don't get hung up on Regression Theorem stuff.
Bitcoin is a case where people didn't have any prior expectation.
I don't think that's right. There would be an enormous range for possible future purchasing power, but the technical mechanics of bitcoin could place some bounds on it. In the moment, they were allocating costly things to the production of bitcoin (electricity, their own time, computational resources, etc.). Even if they didn't do precise accounting, they would have at least a vague sense of what their production costs were and likely wouldn't exchange bitcoin wildly below what it had cost to acquire.
You were right earlier to draw an analogy to currency speculation, but were wrong to make the analogy with a currency that is already in use. Same for the Esperanto analogy: there was a point prior to Esperanto actually being made, but after it had been conceived and was being developed, when it was not yet a language.
Ok, some of the confusion is perhaps coming from thinking money is a purely Boolean category, rather than a continuous property.
Hoppe talks about partial moneys (not sure if that was his terminology), which are commodities that take on some monetary characteristics. The Regression Theorem is trying to explain how things get started on the path to becoming money. They had some recognized properties that suggested they might function as a MoE, SoV, or UoA, and began being acquired for those reasons, resulting in a monetary premium. If that monetary premium amplified over time, then the good is considered to be emerging as a money, but it isn't money until it's overwhelmingly used for monetary purposes.
In that sense, those nerds weren't thinking bitcoin was money initially, as the word is used in the Austrian tradition. They may have used the word "money" to describe what they were making, but since there was no monetary use yet, an Austrian would say they had created something that might be able to fulfil monetary functions if people adopted it for such purposes.
This is just my own framing and why I don't get hung up on Regression Theorem stuff.
I don't think that's right. There would be an enormous range for possible future purchasing power, but the technical mechanics of bitcoin could place some bounds on it. In the moment, they were allocating costly things to the production of bitcoin (electricity, their own time, computational resources, etc.). Even if they didn't do precise accounting, they would have at least a vague sense of what their production costs were and likely wouldn't exchange bitcoin wildly below what it had cost to acquire.
You were right earlier to draw an analogy to currency speculation, but were wrong to make the analogy with a currency that is already in use. Same for the Esperanto analogy: there was a point prior to Esperanto actually being made, but after it had been conceived and was being developed, when it was not yet a language.