Plenty of people have done that and captured some value. Bitcoin has the most secure network of its type and that has inherent value, it's also perceived to have value by millions of people around the world as opposed to your random fork.
Not sure if you see that it's your understanding of the world that's off here.
Money is a social construct. Other social constructs are countries and borders. They only exist due to social consensus and is a pure social construct. Social constructs do have real impact on your individual well-being though and should not be trivialized.
Gold was a currency and a store of wealth for a long time for multiple societies (even when most of those use cases you listed didn't exist). If only they had the knowledge and wisdom of epolanski from 2024 they wouldn't have made this mistake...
Pretty sure that every society that unilaterally adopted gold used it for jewellery first, and only started using it as a currency and store of wealth once its value had already been established.
Sure, that's because a good piece of jewelry shares the same property of a good money: its scarcity. Gold was introduced to humanity as an ornament, but eventually humans discovered a better use for it.
> Sure, that's because a good piece of jewelry shares the same property of a good money: its scarcity.
That is absolutely FALSE.
Good "money" requires a tiny bit of inflation, otherwise there's no incentive into spending, but hoarding.
When people start hoarding money, rather than spending or investing it, economy starts freezing.
Cryptocurrencies are a living example of that: there is absolutely NO incentive into using them to trade, only to hoard them. Why use them today if price goes up? Non sense. Indeed nobody uses them to trade, ever. There's less people spending Bitcoin for goods today, than there was in 2016 when the amount of people in the sector was a magnitude lower.
In fact, even the narrative on websites like Bitcoin's have long moved from the "currency" to the "store of value" argument.
You're compounding many wrong and false information and building an absolutely distorted idea of how money and finance works.
At the end of the day, that's history repeating itself. As wealthy people accumulate real wealth, poor people chase pieces of paper or ridiculous blockchain hashes.
> Sure, that's because a good piece of jewelry shares the same property of a good money: its scarcity.
There are all sorts of scarce things that we don't use for jewellery or see as particularly valuable. Gold has physical properties that make it specifically useful for jewellery (easy to work, doesn't tarnish, shiny, etc.).
BTC's value is the massive network securing it, and the trust in the brand's security and resistance to debasement. Its value lives in peoples' head, similar to many other assets.
Going on GitHub and downloading core code and deploying a new coin based on Bitcoin or some other crypto.
I'll call it HackerNewsCoin.
Didn't know it was that simple to create "wealth".
What a foolishness to think that something that has no intrinsic value can constitute wealth. Don't confuse price with value.
It really is true crypto combines all that people don't understand about economy with all that people don't understand about technology.