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RE: What Is Financial Value?

in #economics6 years ago (edited)
From my view, there is no such thing as objective, intrinsic financial value and all claims of "utility" value (with regards to finances) are just proxies for what individual actors transacting on a market decide based on current context. Financial value is an emergent property of moment-in-time, voluntary transactions which lead to price discovery.

That is true, but legal tender enjoys special status that other media of exchange do not have. 1) Legal tender is required to pay taxes and fines by the government. 2) Those with accounting obligation are obliged to keep accounts in legal tender. 3) If a creditor does not accept legal tender as repayment of debt, the courts and the police will not help force a debtor to pay.

Anything scarce can instantly be turned into money in a geographical territory by an entity with a monopoly of violence in that territory that starts demanding that scarce thing in exchange for not inflicting violence against other entities in that territory.

The intrinsic value of equity instruments can be assessed using the discounted net value of all future cash flows, for example. Gold or cryptocurrencies have no intrinsic value under the same criteria as equities. Yet, gold has been valued for centuries far above its value as raw material for industry or jewelry. The value of cryptocurrencies is mostly speculative at the moment. But they are likely to have much value in the future as forms of money enabling the Internet of Value, particularly between machines.

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From my perspective, taxation is theft and the courts and police are just more monopoly service providers provided by a violent monopoly. That means, to me, the current system is a forced narrative, but still a narrative just the same.

If we talk about future cash flows, cryptocurrency, I think, will have far greater value becuase it’s a better form of money (a better ledger) and people will want it over fiat.

From my perspective, taxation is theft and the courts and police are just more monopoly service providers provided by a violent monopoly. That means, to me, the current system is a forced narrative, but still a narrative just the same.

Not just the same. Ask any libertarian.

If we talk about future cash flows, cryptocurrency, I think, will have far greater value becuase it’s a better form of money (a better ledger) and people will want it over fiat.

That is not what cash flow means in the context of calculating the intrinsic value of an asset. I'm not even sure if the same method is applicable for other types of assets. Commodities like oil have no cash flow in the same sense. You can trade them and profit from them if you sell them for more than you bought them. But equities like properties or company stock have incoming cash flows like rent income or dividends and outgoing cash flows in the case of properties like heating, maintenance, property taxes etc. This is standard economics. The dollar, by the way, has no intrinsic value, either, except for the fact that you need to have it to pay your taxes and fines.

It is a valid question whether or not cryptocurrencies will have higher extrinsic value compared to fiat money, that is, will distributed ledgers secured by cryptography be favored over centralized ledgers in the future. Typically, centralized money ledgers are maintained by banks. Their advantage is that they are more energy efficient than distributed ledgers using cryptography but require trust despite accounting obligation and going through regular audits.

I think distributed ledger technology will become popular in IoT and distributed apps in the future. Dealing with banks is simply too cumbersome for those purposes.

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