Recently, ethereum switched from proof of work to proof of stake back in september of last year but it's price didn't collapse.
previously, i've heard various marxists say that the value of cryptocurrencies lies in the labor done to make the GPUs and electricity to create them. But ethereum now requires less than 1% of the energy it previously required yet the price has not collapsed to 1%.
Proof of stake is a rent mechanism, no? I haven't finished vol III of Capital yet, but my understanding is that the value of a property is its productivity divided by the interest. The reduction of power use to 1% is conspicuously close to what the various central banks' interests are. Some might object to this, pointing out that say the Swedish Central Bank's interest is 3.0%, quite a lot higher than 1%, but we see also in the picture that there's plenty of "wiggle room" since the price of ETH has fluctuated by a factor of 1:5. Should interests reach 10% then things will become much more interesting, or in the case of the Swedish Central Bank, 500%!
September is also not very long ago, certainly not long enough to shake out any long players.
I had an email conversation with Paul Cockshott recently, on the recent video on Bitcoin that he did, asking whether exchange-value itself is a use-value. Cockshott does not think so, but Marx does (vol III), and Cockshott disagrees with Marx explicitly on that. I am more on Marx' side, since Bitcoin is clearly useful and therefore we should consider it to have aspects of being a commodity. But it is also a rent mechanism. Early adopters benefit from new bag holders coming into the system.
exchane value is a use value?
interesting.
i can see how that would be the case, but i wonder if that doesn't cause issues in making a falsifiable theory.
if exchange value is a use value itself, wouldn't that make money a commodity? (and not the physical cash. by "money" i mean the digital ledger indicating your right to command labor power).
i'd love to have a convo about this. (to me, it seems like all the commodities i can think of which would have a use-value of exchange value could equally be modeled/understood as having a use-value not of exchange but of future monetary return. bitcoin, stocks, bonds, etc.)
@joe I think you can choose to either consider exchange-value to be a use-value or not depending on the discussion, so long as you make the choice explicit. Otherwise you get a language mismatch and communication breaks down.
Currencies are traded as if they were commodities. But since there's only one issuer of each currency their price cannot approach their value. A systematic difference between price and value, when positive, amounts to rent. A state can print money to extract rent which it can then invest. This is the MMT position.
If we say that exchange-value is a use-value, then that use-value must be cishistorical. I suspect that this is Cockshott's position, that cishistorical use-values are not use-values at all. But this causes problems when one considers industries whose historical time has passed, for example the stone tools of Oldowan industry.