IconoclasticMind

Trump’s bragging about destroying civilian infrastructure. This looks like an ISIS video.

Trump is starting to resemble Yeltsin, but without the ability to blame the vodka

As we watch things spin out of control in the Middle East I can't help but recall, and I've said it many, many times before and I'll say it again: one human being should not be able to have all this power. The Founders didn't want it that way and they were 100% right.

Calling Bitcoin “an asset with no fundamental value” is not an argument, it’s an admission that someone’s understanding of value formation stalled somewhere between Econ 101 worksheets and goldbug chain emails. The phrase “fundamental value” only sounds intelligent to people who never updated their operating system after 1974. The stupidity begins with the premise. “Fundamental value” implies there is some objective, metaphysical sticker price baked into assets independent of human preference, liquidity, scarcity, monetary premium, or market structure. It imagines a world where value is a physical constant like gravity, not a dynamic equilibrium shaped by incentives, time preference, and game theory. It’s a worldview for economists who still think money emerges from government decree rather than collective selection under competition. In the real world, “fundamental value” only exists in two places: 1.valuation textbooks written during the Reagan administration 2.the minds of academics who have never traded anything more volatile than a savings bond Everything else is priced by liquidity, scarcity, utility, coordination, settlement assurances, and credibility. That is how markets actually function. That is why assets with identical cash flows trade differently. That is why gold has a trillion-dollar premium above its industrial use. That is why sovereign debt with negative yield still clears. And that is why Bitcoin, the most secure bearer asset ever invented, carries enormous monetary premium. Bitcoin’s “fundamental value” is its function, not a discounted cash flow fantasy: It settles globally in minutes It is perfectly scarce It is seizure-resistant It is credibly neutral It holds purchasing power across time It serves as pristine collateral It underpins a multi-trillion-dollar emerging credit ecosystem It monetizes energy into an incorruptible monetary base Saying this has “no fundamental value” is like saying property rights have no fundamental value. Hanke cannot compute Bitcoin because he still thinks value comes from dividends and coupons. Yet the largest stores of value in human history - land, gold, art, reserves, currency bases - generated zero cash flow. Their “fundamental value” came from the role they play in the economic order. This is precisely why Bitcoin is absorbing monetary premium at a faster rate than any asset ever recorded. The phrase “fundamental value” collapses instantly the moment you ask someone to define it without referencing models built on arbitrary assumptions. Ask ten economists to define it and you get eleven answers. Ask markets, and you get one: Value is what people coordinate around when the costs of defection exceed the costs of adoption. If you unironically say “Bitcoin has no fundamental value,” you’re advertising that you have no idea how monetary assets emerge. You’re telling the world you don’t understand scarcity, credibility premiums, network effects, collateral markets, or macro-micro feedback loops. You’re waving a sign that says I think money is whatever the government says it is. Hanke is critiquing his own inability to understand a monetary asset that doesn’t fit into the obsolete toys he used to teach freshmen.