Money 2.0 Stuff: Jury's out!

Fundamentally speaking, how much is bitcoin worth? How about ether? It’s 2019, nearly 2020 I guess, and we still don’t know how to accurately value commodity money. We’ll probably never know. Sure, under Proof of Stake, ether transitions to a bond-like instrument, but its yields are themselves denominated in ether, so we’re basically back to square one. Bitcoin will likely never be amenable to a quantitative valuation framework, which is probably quite fortunate, all things considered: “number go up to approximately $Xbn” just doesn’t carry the same weight, does it? 

Cryptocurrency exchanges, on the other hand, are fairly easy to value. ‘Cryptocurrency’ aside, they’re pretty standard businesses with cash flows and costs and growth rates. Assuming they have access to internal figures, an analyst should be able to come up with a fairly accurate valuation range. The hardest part is actually getting access to internal figures.