I agree that the labor theory of value is retahded.
Bitcoin gets its value for somewhere else than the cost of mining though. It's essentially just a tool that does a job. And monkeys use tools to do stuff with them. #eloquence

Just like Gold is a tool for monkeys to more easily trade and store value. Gold is good money for it's properties. Look at the periodic table only 4 items on there are fit for middle world sized creatures to use. Some break down, some change to another element, some are radioactive and kill you, some are gases, some are liquids, some are too abundant (try buying a house using a chunk of iron!), some are easy to recreate.
Only gold and silver could be divided, recombined, were fungible (as opposed to say, diamonds and cows).
They were also rare enough to use.

When we discovered how to heat metals up to higher temperatures, platinum and palladium became useful as money as well. Too late though.

Bitcoin has those properties and some extra ones too. Too bad mining wastes and sucks out a fuck-ton of wealth from the ecosystem though..