Bitconomics 102 - Where is the value AKA "We have been here before"

Value is something difficult to see. When  Mrs Newby Blue, Mr Sceptic Red and Mr OldEntrepeneur Brown meet the conversation jumps from "grandpa´s tales" to a late friday pub night brawl .Using a women character as a new-by is random, no intention behind. Also, if you are not British replace pub with any other meeting place.

- I am telling you, Bitcoin and all the Alts are just nothing, a cheap piece of software that are going nowhere!

- Well maybe, I have aready spoken with Mr Philosopher Black here and I am still doubtfull about all this thing. 

- Oh... you see this white beird I have, well, I was here when there was no internet at all and I have seen a few things before the Cryptocurrencies boom.

- But this is surely different... everyone says is revolutionary.

- All? Nah.. just a bunch of carpetbadgers and cybercriminals!

- The problem is that, once more, we are in a territory where we do not yet know what is value and what is not.

- How is that? Value is always something clear.

- Oh, no no my young friend... I still remember when nobody could really put a price on Yahoo, Altavista and others.

- Alta-what??

- A thousand years ago, in the 90´s, there were more that one search engine out there. They all had funny names like Altavista, Terra and Yahoo. This was a bit after the formation of the oceans and right before Google and when there was no e-commerce.

- Wooow, no ecommerce, really??

- And... listen because this is true as isnumeric("abc")=FALSE... listen I say, TELEPHONES DID NOT HAVE INTERNET AT ALL.

- Ooooohhhh

- Yeah yeah, very interesting, but what does it have to do with Cryptocurrencies??

- Well, back in those days, nobody could put a price on those search engines, nor for that matter, to any of the web pages. And that was because they almost had no income and nobody knew which one would win the race nor how would they ever make money. It still happens nowdays with UBER and others.

- I see.. so .. how did they solve that problem?

- Several things were tried.. for example valuing the pages for the number of pageviews, since that would eventually be used for advertising, then only by unique visitors, then by engangement,... Many of this metrics are still used nowdays.

- But none of those are alive today right? So they were bluffs.

- Well that is a different story really, but my point is that WE STILL HAVEN´T FOUND THE WAY OF VALUATING CRYPTOCURRENCIES.

- That is because they have NO VALUE. It is impossible that something is 25% more in value in just a week or vice-versa.

- Hold on... so why can´t we agree on a price for these?

- For starters, the ownership is unclear. Many of them have consensus governance. Also, we still do not know what will survive the test of time. As I told you Astalavista was the Bitcoin of its time, but the Google guys invented a far superior system that ate them alive.

- So playing cryptos is just for fools... they will all dissapear eventually...

- I would rather say that we still don´t know which ones will survive, because a consensus on what is value and waht is not is starting to become more clear. Also, the users are forming communities that will lead the future developments.

- So, the cryptocurrencies of the future are not here yet?

-  We don´t know, but it is going to be interesting times again.