If only Lily Allen had reconsidered this back in 2009.
So I asked myself this very question this morning when I read a report dating back to December last year. The link itself kinda spoils the punchline... The TLDR was Lily Allen was approached to do a gig, when asked what the payment was, the offer of payment was in the form of 200,000 BTC, which wasn't worth much back then because BitCoin was relatively new. Allen's response was "As if", basically pooh-poohing on the cryptocurrency.
If she had taken the offer and done the gig, the BitCoin she would have received as payment would have been worth, you guessed it, 4.7 billion (with a B) US dollars today. She sorely regrets it now... but then again, she hasn't really done much else since she first came on the scene and "The Fear" was pretty much a one-hit wonder amid a few of her other songs that made the charts...
But here's the thing, she turned down the idea of being paid in BitCoin because at that stage a) it was relatively new on the scene, b) at that time it wasn't worth much, c) she under-estimated its potential and d) she felt she was worth more (understandable). She could have treated this as a non-paying event like other singers could have, pocketed the BitCoin and moved on, to then become the richest performing artist some 12 years later without breaking a sweat.
Cryptocurrency has value, becuase of the value attributed to it. The more value attributed to it, the greater its worth. Could Allen have done some research to understand what BitCoin was and noticed possible trends? It's possible, the Internet was only about 15 or so years past the Dot Com boom and full of various online resource tools, to which then she could very well have Googled the information she needed to find out more about this "new fan-dangled crypto-whatsit" she had heard of at the time of that discussion. If she had researched it, she may have thought it was a ridiculous thought and dismissed it accordingly, and rightly so, very few had really heard of this "cryptocurrency" at that stage, so it could have been considered a load of crap.
My theory is that she thought it was a bunch of baloney from the get-go, which is why her response of "as if" seemed to pretty much solidify her opinion at the time... In 2014, she lamented the loss in a tweet (See resources section below)
"Hundreds of Thousands"... Poor thing, if she only knew back then...She could have easily sold it a few BitCoin at a time and retired early for the rest of her life...
But I digress, to Lily Allen, the 200,000BTC wasn't worth much because she didn't ascribe any value to it, nor saw its potential... If I recall correctly, there's only really 21,000,000 BitCoin available overall, that's the limit. Her potential 200K BTC windfall comes up to just under 1% of the total BitCoin available. And some of us newbies like myself have barely made 10% of 1% of 1% of one of those 21 million... And it's only because we see some value. Granted, with what I have earned I can't even buy half a cup of decent coffee, but I've made something... But imagine, owning almost 1% of the current 21 million available... That's staggering enough...
I guess I could imagine what it would be like if Scrooge McDuck had gotten into BitCoin as a side hustle while still having the luxury of being able to go for a dip in his Money Bin; he'd probably make a mint (pardon the pun). He could probably see the potential in anything provided it had enough value. In fact, now that I think of it, there was an episode based off a 1954 Scrooge McDuck comic, called "The Land of Trala La", where Scrooge searches for a land where money has no value after being approached several times for money. He takes several bottles of "nerve medication" with him on this trip only to find that the natives of Trala La, a uptopian place where money has no value, place value on the discarded bottle caps. As the value of these bottlecaps escalates, to appease the natives, Scrooge McDuck has a billion bottlecaps air-dropped into the land of Trala La, which results in the inhabitants becoming angry, as their fields are now covered with bottlecaps. Technically, this would have also lowered the value of the bottlecap to such miniscule proportions causing hyperinflation, whereby ordinary items would cost an absolute buttload in currency. If you want to see the corresponding episode, it's available on Disney+ in the 1987 run of DuckTales, Season 2 Episode 6 - "The Land of Trala La"
So, to answer the question in the title, "What is the true value of crypptocurrency?" Put simply, it's relative to the person making the observation and the general concensus of those involved with setting the value. As I said, cryptocurrency has value, because it's been ascribed a value, and since then those in the Crypto world have valued and re-valued it over the last 12 years to the point where it's now a currency of demand, and anything of demand in turn, will have value. If only Lily Allen had considered it that way... or read that 1954 Scrooge McDuck comic...
