RE: What gives Crypto value? A letter to potential investors.
What a deep comment @gbalnis!
Please allow me to struggle to add some value to it, not only because of its excellent points; but because we are building, with the post and the attached comments, some really useful discussion in my view.
I've pondered your point about discounted future cash flows from another viewpoint. I've asked myself the following question. If we regard bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency as being just a special type of currency, like the USD or CDN or YEN, why should we expect its long-term price pattern to be substantially different from those that we already see in the Forex market?
My answer to this question is that there may be a temporary, though potentially very major, loss of confidence in fiat currencies to the benefit of certain internationally accepted crypto's. But this process has a near-to-medium-term boundary, even if it might make us who hold the crypto's fantastically rich, assuming that we can either buy goods and services by paying with our cryptocurrencies or we have a viable bridges to cross from our cryptocurrencies into fiat moneys.
So your point about discouraging analogues to stocks is an absolutely major one, from my viewpoint.
Here's an interesting point, to me anyway. I can envisage a massive increase in the absolute number of people around the world who will regard BTC as a relatively safe haven compared to the other monies that are available to them and can afford to pay to get into a certain amount of bitcoin.
The ability to get into bitcoin to, for example get out of Zimbabwe dollars, is something I see as a definite example of utility. But I regard that utility as being a qualitative variable in the sense that it either exists or doesn't exist for a particular individual; but it doesn't have a quantity that allows us to think about this particlear utility increasing/decreasing over time.
Finally, I offer my two cents about the model to value a crypto currency. I argue at https://www.marketstatsanalytics.com/valuingcryptos.html that there are valuation dimensions measured at different levels of measurement (including some ordinal or nominal), and therefore we cannot get to a single-valued variable to measure that value. The closest we can get is a vector , where at each position in the vector there is a single variable or a function of variables that are measured at the same level of measurement.
The upshot, then, is that the valuation is inherently multidimensional, and the sooner we recognize this the more sophisticated will be our investing behaviour, in my opinion.
Cheers!