From Wikipedia: Marx was a scholar, not a politician. He was primarily concerned with disproving the concept of marginal utility. He didn’t want to publish volumes 2 and 3 of Capital until he could disprove the concept to his satisfaction, which he never did. Engels and others saw the power-mongering potential and published the rest.

Duane Jones disproved marginal utility neatly, condensed into three words:

Repeats when sampled.

A product or idea will gain market share when people do an EXPERIMENT, comparing two sensations with our natural balances and bridges and equations. If the new product or entertainment is BETTER than the existing when SAMPLED, the consumer will REPEAT the purchase, or REPEAT watching the TV show or listening to the leader.

Price is NOT the driving or input variable. Price is the driven or output variable. From the seller’s viewpoint, the whole purpose of the experiment is to increase the perceived value and the price in unison. Otherwise why go through the trouble of developing and advertising the product?

Economists take price as the driving variable. Economists assume that the compared products are EQUAL, and only the EXPENSE varies. The increase happens when you buy more units of the same (or equivalent) product, not when you buy a better product.

This is perfectly backwards. Real people judge by quality, not by price. Substitution may be possible for billionaires choosing whether to buy 30 billion units of a 10-million dollar abstraction, or 10 billion units of a 30-million dollar abstraction. Real physical products are rarely equivalent or substitutable. Even if they were, real people rarely have the ability to choose.

Economists sold Obamacare through the economistic fraud of “shopping around” to find the equivalent medical product with the lowest price. Most people have no choice at all. Their employer provides the insurance. If the employer didn’t provide it, we still couldn’t “shop around” without losing our insurance, perhaps forever. The mandatory nature of Obamacare removed the possibility entirely.

Bitcoin fails the Jones test before the starting gate because you can’t even sample it. Bitcoin pretends to be a currency, but you can’t earn it as wages and you can’t buy anything except more bitcoin with it. You can’t determine whether it works better than dollars, because it DOESN’T FUCKING WORK AT ALL.

Bitcoin pretends to be a store of value, but its “value” jumps up and down all the time, and the “storage” only lasts long enough for the founders to abscond with the real dollars. You can’t store water in a thunderstorm. You can’t store wheat in a pigpen.