That radical-Libertarian ideology is a common denominator with devs and their backers should be an extremely troubling... 'anomaly'. The role BANE Capital and inQtel played in the origins of Bitcoin and BLOCKchain is profoundly significant, despite (suspiciously)the zealots of said technologies insistence that such critical, intimate relationships be naively overlooked.
There is a PROFOUND CONTRADICTION underlying all of cryptocurrency, namely the foundational tenet: fiat currency is inherently unstable and untenable and unjust, yet cryptocurrency is the ULTIMATE expression of a currency which is STRICTLY fiat.
That word.. i do not think it means what you think it means. Crypto is voluntarily, fiat is by decree and force.
It is an object of no intrinsic value, even to the extent that as an 'object' it doesn't even exist, brought into existence solely by decree ("I/we have created Bitcoin, and I/we hereby declare it to have value, or even the ability to have value as a medium of exchange"). Opting to attach that value to the currency of some other government (which currency is itself fiat) only pretends some separation exists between the crypto and the force used by that government to maintain its currency. Because you have someone else committing the violence by which you benefit doesn't mean you aren't perpetuating that use of force.
As for its voluntariness: everything is voluntary for the rich, and the rich are clearly who dominate the ownership of the vast majority of crypto. Which only further sinks the whole 'decentralized' idea. How can it be decentralized when the vast majority crypto is owned by such scant few?
'decentralized' can have different meanings depending on your frame of reference. For me 'decentralized' doesn't mean communism where wealth is evenly spread, it means the governance (I.e.- the code/smart contracts) is transparent and accessible to all.
Now since it's obvious that those who already are rich in fiat can easily accumulate crypto wealth faster than those with less fiat. However, as we have seen with recent ICO's (Civic limiting purchases based on identity, or EOS limiting purchase based on time), the ability for crypto to develop resistance to market manipulations by the few, is evidence that crypto is more 'decentralized' in that it allows other factors (besides wealth) like identity and time to increase distribution and equilibrium.
How are you defining intrinsic value here? By its usage as a financial term or by the dictionary definition?
If cryptocurrency doesn't exist, then neither does anything you've written here. It's all code. You are contradicting yourself by using a blockchain to say that data on a blockchain doesn't exist!
I'm upvoting your comment to give you some non-existent Steem. Please feel free to go out and trade it for something with some "intrinsic value."
Is this is in the sense of exists, as in crypto exists voluntarily?
Code is law.