10 sats \ 5 replies \ @Undisciplined 21 Sep 2023 \ parent \ on: What is the issue with Michael Saylor's Bitcoin is "Digital Energy" Idea bitcoin
See Labor Theory of Value.
Work doesn't have value. Producing things valued by others has value. We don't exchange things of equal value. In voluntary exchanges both parties end up with things they valued more.
I exchange my time, attention, and effort to create a product or service. The product or service may or may not have value but my work has value to me. I've never heard of a business that pays people to work. They want a product/result. But you don't get the result without the work. So the work by relation has value but not on its own. That said, my time has value to me even if not to others.
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You're hitting on it pretty well. Your work has value to you, because there are other things you'd rather be doing. That means the product of your time needs to be valuable enough for your employer/customer to be willing to pay for it.
The easiest way to see the flaw in thinking work itself adds value is to just imagine how much you'd still get paid if technology made it possible to produce the same goods from the same inputs without your work.
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Fair enough. But I'd also say that work has the capacity to create value, as it is what enables the transformation of lower-valued resources to higher-valued resources.
And, in a way, work might be the most sensible common denominator for value... and since Bitcoin is proof-of-work, bitcoin might be the most sensible denominator of value too :)
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All that matters from a value standpoint is the final product. The costs, including work, are the producers problem and reducing them is where profits come from. Thinking of work as part of what determines value is literally the labor theory of value fallacy.
The reason it seems intuitive is that people are willing to work more to generate things of high value, but notice the causal connection is exactly the opposite from the labor theory of value.
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Nope, you don't understand what bitcoin is and why it matters, but you accidentally nearly stumbled on an observation that is true: value cannot be generated without work
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