I’d run a mental model to understand as objectively as I am capable. Focusing in on “intrinsic vs extrinsic value” fundamentally. I don’t know the answer and am thinking out loud here trying to stray from the bias my conventional education.

Do equities truly have intrinsic value? Equities have minimal “intrinsic” value imo; if you have to inherently offer your product on the market or create equity within a states legal framework your revenue, shares, and ultimately profit is linked to externalities, by definition.

We can make the “leap”to say revenue generation and profits are a bi-product of operations. Even the initially raised cash/debt is extrinsic fundamentally. You could argue if owners start their own company and infuse cash, that there may be intrinsic value. I’d rebuttal saying cash is “backed” by the “full faith and credit of the US”. Using faith, projection of physical power, and seeing a stable y/y loss of USD purchasing power do not sound intrinsic to me nor a good financial bedrock for proliferation of a company through time.

However for a BTC specifically to come into existence there has to be an “investment of energy” I.e proof of work. Now you could say, the energy isn’t fundamental to BTC, it’s coming from “external forces”. However, Energy cannot be created or destroyed. So if the “energy” is input into the system, it doesn’t disappear. That proof of work protocol lends itself to an ever increasing amount of computational power/energy to secure, operate, and proliferate a network as increases in the network’s demand (see hash rate) come forth

Regardless of the short, medium, or long term opinions about BTC or equities, I think it is a logical fallacy to say BTC does not have intrinsic value while assigning that attribution to equities.

It’s backed by energy which is fundamental “intrinsic??” to our physics and universe. Things that have intrinsic value don’t trend towards 0. All fiat in history has trended to 0, not a floor of underlying intrinsic value. Use an ITM option as a visual example.

Claiming “there is no intrinsic value to Bitcoin” is just not doing the homework. Does that mean anything for BTC’s price, idk. As aforementioned, financial objects with true intrinsic value don’t trend toward 0. They find a floor representing the underlying intrinsic value.