The Funeral of "Fundamental Value": Why Bitcoin Breaks the Minds of Traditional Economists.

The “fundamental value” of Bitcoin is freedom, verification, and mathematical certainty in an age of deception.

When Steve Hanke, a Professor of Applied Economics who has spent a lifetime in the ivory towers of academia, dismissed Bitcoin as having “no fundamental value,” he wasn’t making an argument.

He was making an admission. He was admitting that his understanding of value formation stalled somewhere between a 1970s Econ 101 worksheet and a goldbug chain email.

Steve Hanke is not alone. This sentiment is the clarion call of a generation of economists who are watching the world change and, unable to explain it with their existing toolkits, choose to deny it instead.

The phrase “fundamental value” sounds intelligent. It carries the weight of authority, the scent of old leather-bound textbooks, and the confidence of Wall Street boardrooms. However, to anyone paying attention to the evolution of markets over the last twenty years, the phrase only sounds intelligent to those who have never updated their operating system since 1974.

The stupidity of the critique begins with the premise itself. It assumes that “value” is a static noun, hidden inside an asset like a prize in a cereal box, rather than a dynamic verb—an action performed by markets.

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The Myth of the Metaphysical Price Tag

The term “fundamental value,” as used by critics like Hanke, implies that there is some objective, metaphysical sticker price baked into assets. They imagine this value exists independently of human preference, liquidity, scarcity, monetary premium, or market structure.

It imagines a Newtonian universe of finance where value is a physical constant like gravity—measurable, predictable, and unchanging. In this fantasy, if you strip away the market sentiment, the speculation, and the liquidity, you are left with the “real” object.

This is a worldview designed for economists who still believe money emerges from government decree rather than collective selection under competition. It is a worldview that comforts those who believe that unless an asset yields a coupon or a dividend, it is merely a hallucination.