Objections and Replies

Every new framework invites scrutiny. Having proposed that value is constructed through transactions between embodied organisms and economic scaffolds, we must now confront the objections that this view provokes. Some of these objections are technical; others are philosophical. All deserve serious engagement.

The Objection from Behaviorism

“You’ve eliminated the mind. By focusing on transactions and traces rather than preferences and utilities, you’ve reduced economics to behaviorism—the old psychological doctrine that denied the relevance of mental states. But we know mental states matter. People have beliefs, desires, intentions. Ignoring these is not scientific rigor; it is impoverishment.”

This objection rests on a confusion between denying internal states and bracketing them for analytical purposes.

Behaviorism, in its classical form, held that mental states were either nonexistent or epiphenomenal—mere shadows cast by stimulus-response chains. The behaviorist claimed that talk of “wanting” or “believing” was unscientific because such states could not be directly observed.

Constructed value theory makes no such claim. We explicitly acknowledge that organisms have internal states—interoceptive signals, physiological conditions, anticipatory models, affective tones. These states are causally relevant. They are why organisms act at all. Hunger motivates the search for food. Fear motivates avoidance. Anticipation of future scarcity motivates saving.

What we deny is not the existence of these states but our ability to access them directly in economic analysis. The internal states of other organisms are opaque to us. We cannot measure another person’s hunger, cannot verify their fear, cannot read their anticipatory models. What we can observe are their actions and the traces those actions leave.

The transaction is a sufficient statistic in the technical sense: it compresses the causally relevant information about internal states into an observable outcome. We do not need to know the internal configuration that produced the transaction; we can work with the transaction itself.

This is methodological humility, not metaphysical denial. The behaviorist said: “There is nothing behind behavior.” We say: “There is something behind behavior, but we cannot see it directly, so we study the behavior and its traces.” These are very different positions.

Consider an analogy. A geologist studying sedimentary layers does not deny that the organisms whose fossils appear in those layers had internal states—metabolisms, drives, experiences. But the geologist cannot access those states. What the geologist can study are the traces: the fossil, the sediment, the stratigraphic record. This is not reductionism; it is appropriate scope. Constructed value theory is economic geology, not economic behaviorism.

The Objection from Preference Persistence

“People have stable preferences that persist across time. I’ve preferred coffee to tea for decades. I consistently choose mountains over beaches for vacation. These patterns are not random fluctuations in internal state; they are enduring features of who I am. Your framework, by emphasizing moment-to-moment alliesthetic variation, cannot account for this stability.”

The objection correctly identifies that preferences exhibit regularities across time. But it misidentifies the nature of these regularities.

In the constructed value framework, what we call “preferences” are not essential properties of selves—intrinsic features lodged in an unchanging core. They are patterns: regularities in the relationship between organism and environment that emerge across many occasions of value construction.

Consider your preference for coffee. This is not a single stable state but a pattern that emerges from many individual encounters: mornings when fatigue meets caffeine, afternoons when ritual provides comfort, social occasions when coffee signals belonging. Each encounter is an occasion of value construction, shaped by the internal state at that moment. The pattern—“I prefer coffee”—is a summary of these encounters, not a cause of them.

Patterns persist because the conditions that generate them persist. Your physiology has regularities: you wake in similar states, you metabolize caffeine similarly, your circadian rhythms repeat. Your environment has regularities: coffee is available, tea is available, the social meanings persist. The interaction of regular organism with regular environment produces regular outcomes. But the regularity is in the pattern of interactions, not in a hidden preference-essence.

This reframing has consequences. It explains why preferences can change—when organism or environment changes, the pattern shifts. It explains why preferences can be context-dependent—the same “preference” may not manifest in unfamiliar settings. It explains why preferences can be surprising—in new situations, the organism may act in ways that seem inconsistent with prior patterns, because the prior pattern emerged from prior conditions.

The coffee preference is real. But it is real as a pattern, not as a property. The difference matters for how we model economic behavior: we should expect stability where conditions are stable, and change where conditions change. We should not be surprised when lifelong preferences evaporate in new circumstances, or when novel preferences crystallize rapidly.

The Objection from Rational Choice

“Economics has made tremendous progress by modeling agents as optimizers—entities that choose actions to maximize expected utility given their beliefs and preferences. This framework is mathematically precise, generates testable predictions, and underlies centuries of economic theory. You propose to replace it with… what? Organisms stumbling toward equilibrium? How is this an improvement?”

The objection assumes that rational choice theory is the benchmark against which alternatives must be measured. But the benchmark has problems of its own.

Rational choice requires that agents have preferences that are complete (they can rank any two alternatives), transitive (if A is preferred to B and B to C, then A is preferred to C), and stable (they don’t change arbitrarily during the analysis). It requires that agents know these preferences introspectively. It requires that agents calculate the expected utility of available options. It requires that agents select the option with highest expected utility.

Each of these requirements is empirically dubious. Real humans exhibit incomplete preferences, intransitive choices, shifting valuations. They do not know their preferences in advance; they discover them through action. They do not calculate expected utilities; they use heuristics, rules of thumb, imitation, and impulse. They often do not select optimal options even when these are identified.

Behavioral economics has catalogued hundreds of “anomalies”—deviations from rational choice predictions. These include loss aversion, framing effects, present bias, anchoring, availability bias, and many more. The standard response has been to treat these as errors—departures from the rational benchmark that need special explanation.

Constructed value theory offers a different response: there is no deviation from rationality because there is no prior rational agent to deviate from. The organism is not trying and failing to maximize utility. It is constructing value through interaction, shaped by internal states and environmental affordances.

Consider the phenomenon of loss aversion—the finding that losses loom larger than equivalent gains. From the rational choice perspective, this is a bias, a departure from the neutral evaluation that utility theory assumes. From the constructed value perspective, it is a predictable consequence of embodied existence. Organisms that treat losses and gains symmetrically would be outcompeted by organisms that prioritize avoiding losses, because in evolutionary environments, losses often meant death while gains merely meant abundance. The asymmetry is not a bug; it is a feature of embodied valuation.

We do not propose that agents are “stumbling toward equilibrium” in some random or purposeless way. We propose that agents are engaging their environment through sensory-motor interaction, shaped by physiological states, responding to affordances, constructing value through transaction. This is purposive activity—but the purpose is not utility maximization. The purpose is the ongoing maintenance of the organism-environment coupling, of which economic behavior is one expression.

The Objection from Meaning and Culture

“Your framework is relentlessly biological, reducing economic behavior to physiology and physics. But humans are not merely organisms; they are meaning-making beings embedded in cultures. A wedding ring has value not because of its metal content but because of what it symbolizes. A national currency has value because of shared belief, not because of any intrinsic property. Your framework cannot account for the symbolic, cultural, and interpretive dimensions of economic life.”

This objection correctly identifies a gap in the exposition so far, but misidentifies its implications.

Meaning is real. Culture is real. Symbols shape behavior. The wedding ring does derive value from what it symbolizes, and that symbolism is culturally constituted.

But meaning and culture are not disembodied abstractions floating free of physical reality. They are embodied in brains, inscribed in artifacts, enacted through practices. The wedding ring’s meaning exists because human nervous systems respond to it in particular ways, because social practices surround it, because other artifacts (wedding ceremonies, marriage laws, romantic narratives) reinforce its significance.

From the enactive perspective we are drawing on, meaning is not added to a meaningless physical world as an extra layer. Meaning emerges from the coupling of organism and environment. The ring affords certain actions (wearing, displaying, exchanging) and precludes others (selling, discarding, ignoring). These affordances are shaped by cultural context—the ring affords different things in different cultures—but they are still affordances: possibilities for action directly perceived.

Cultural affordances are real affordances. The fact that a piece of paper is “money” in one society and “waste” in another does not make its value arbitrary or merely subjective. It means that the affordance structure—what the paper enables and prevents—is different in different contexts. But in each context, the organism perceives and responds to real affordances, not to arbitrary constructions.

Bitcoin is an instructive case. Its value is not derived from cultural convention in the way a fiat currency’s value might be. It emerges from the specific affordances of the protocol: the scarcity enforced by the 21 million cap, the auditability of the ledger, the permissionless access, the thermodynamic security. These are not cultural meanings imposed on neutral substrate; they are properties of the scaffold that enable specific kinds of interaction.

This does not mean culture is irrelevant. The decision to adopt Bitcoin, to trust the network, to participate in the ecosystem—these are shaped by social narratives, by information environments, by cultural contexts. But the affordances themselves are not culturally constructed. They are properties of the physical system that humans perceive and act upon.

The Objection from Predictive Power

“What does constructed value theory give us that we don’t already have? Can it predict economic behavior better than existing theories? Can it guide policy more effectively? If not, what is the point of the new framework?”

This is the right question to ask of any theoretical proposal, and we owe a serious answer.

Constructed value theory offers three things that existing frameworks do not:

First, mechanism. Standard economics describes that certain patterns occur (diminishing marginal utility, supply and demand, price discovery) without explaining how they occur at the level of physical process. Constructed value theory grounds these patterns in the interaction of embodied organisms with their environment. We can trace the causal chain from interoception through action through transaction to trace. This is not merely description; it is mechanism.

Second, epistemic reorientation. By shifting focus from unobservable preferences to observable traces, constructed value theory changes what counts as evidence. We no longer need to infer what people “really want” from their behavior; we study the behavior and its consequences directly. This makes economic analysis more empirical and less speculative.

Third, new avenues. If value construction is embodied, then variables that affect embodiment should affect valuation. This opens research programs: How do physiological states (hunger, fatigue, arousal) affect economic behavior? How do interface designs (friction, affordance clarity) shape transaction patterns? How do environmental conditions (scarcity, abundance, uncertainty) modulate value construction? These questions become tractable when value is understood as embodied interaction rather than disembodied preference.

We do not claim that constructed value theory will replace all existing economics overnight. We claim that it offers a perspective that complements and enriches existing approaches. For some questions—particularly those involving the relationship between human organisms and economic scaffolds like Bitcoin—it may prove especially illuminating.

The Deeper Point: Dissolving Dualisms

Behind several of these objections lies a common structure: a dualism between mind and world, subject and object, internal and external. The objection from behaviorism assumes that we must either privilege internal states (mentalism) or deny them (behaviorism). The objection from rational choice assumes that we must model either abstract optimizers or random stumbling. The objection from culture assumes that meaning is either physical or cultural, not both.

Constructed value theory dissolves these dualisms rather than choosing sides.

The organism and the environment are not separate domains that must somehow be bridged. They are aspects of a single coupled system. The organism shapes its environment through action; the environment shapes the organism through affordance. Value is not located in the object (as labor theory would have it) or in the subject (as utility theory claims). Value is constructed at the interface—at the moment of transaction, where organism and environment meet.

This is Wittgensteinian in spirit. The philosophical puzzles about value—“Where is it? What is it? How can we measure it?”—dissolve when we stop treating value as a thing and start treating it as an activity. The question “What is value?” is replaced by “What is valuing?”—and the answer is: valuing is what happens when embodied organisms interact with their environment, leaving traces that accumulate into stratigraphy.

The Ledger as Mirror and Record

We can now return to the image with which we began this inquiry: the ledger as reflective surface and stratigraphic record.

The ledger does not care about preferences. It does not store utilities. It does not calculate optima. It simply records transactions—the traces of value construction as they occur. Each transaction is the footprint of an organism that acted, motivated by internal states we cannot see, shaped by environmental affordances we can study.

The ledger reflects back to us the aggregate of these actions. It shows us the state of play—who holds what, who has transacted with whom, what patterns have emerged. This reflection is not a judgment; it is a mirror. The abacus does not evaluate; it counts.

But the counting is powerful. By accumulating traces, the ledger creates a stratigraphy that can be studied. We can ask: What transactions occurred? How did they accumulate? What patterns emerged? What does the current state tell us about the history that produced it?

This is economics as geology: reading the record of sedimented activity to understand the forces that shaped it.

Resolving the Lingering Puzzle

We began the book with a puzzle: Why does Bitcoin have value? This question seemed to require either locating value in the object (intrinsic value) or in the subject (subjective utility), and neither answer seemed satisfactory for a digital asset with no physical form (in the naive sense) and no issuing authority.

Constructed value theory dissolves the puzzle. Bitcoin has value because value is constructed through transactions, and transactions occur on the Bitcoin scaffold. The scaffold has specific properties—scarcity, auditability, permissionlessness, thermodynamic security—that enable certain kinds of value construction. Organisms perceive these affordances, act upon them, and leave traces.

The question “Why does Bitcoin have value?” becomes: “How is value constructed on the Bitcoin scaffold?” And the answer is: through the same process by which value is constructed anywhere—embodied organisms interacting with their environment—but with a scaffold that makes the process unusually visible, verifiable, and permanent.

We no longer ask “What is value?” as if seeking a hidden essence. We ask “How does valuing happen?” and we find the answer in the ledger, in the transactions, in the traces of organisms acting in the world.

--- title: "Objections and Replies" --- Every new framework invites scrutiny. Having proposed that value is constructed through transactions between embodied organisms and economic scaffolds, we must now confront the objections that this view provokes. Some of these objections are technical; others are philosophical. All deserve serious engagement. ## The Objection from Behaviorism *"You've eliminated the mind. By focusing on transactions and traces rather than preferences and utilities, you've reduced economics to behaviorism---the old psychological doctrine that denied the relevance of mental states. But we know mental states matter. People have beliefs, desires, intentions. Ignoring these is not scientific rigor; it is impoverishment."* This objection rests on a confusion between *denying* internal states and *bracketing* them for analytical purposes. Behaviorism, in its classical form, held that mental states were either nonexistent or epiphenomenal---mere shadows cast by stimulus-response chains. The behaviorist claimed that talk of "wanting" or "believing" was unscientific because such states could not be directly observed. Constructed value theory makes no such claim. We explicitly acknowledge that organisms have internal states---interoceptive signals, physiological conditions, anticipatory models, affective tones. These states are causally relevant. They are *why* organisms act at all. Hunger motivates the search for food. Fear motivates avoidance. Anticipation of future scarcity motivates saving. What we deny is not the existence of these states but our ability to *access* them directly in economic analysis. The internal states of other organisms are opaque to us. We cannot measure another person's hunger, cannot verify their fear, cannot read their anticipatory models. What we *can* observe are their actions and the traces those actions leave. The transaction is a *sufficient statistic* in the technical sense: it compresses the causally relevant information about internal states into an observable outcome. We do not need to know the internal configuration that produced the transaction; we can work with the transaction itself. This is methodological humility, not metaphysical denial. The behaviorist said: "There is nothing behind behavior." We say: "There is something behind behavior, but we cannot see it directly, so we study the behavior and its traces." These are very different positions. Consider an analogy. A geologist studying sedimentary layers does not deny that the organisms whose fossils appear in those layers had internal states---metabolisms, drives, experiences. But the geologist cannot access those states. What the geologist can study are the traces: the fossil, the sediment, the stratigraphic record. This is not reductionism; it is appropriate scope. Constructed value theory is economic geology, not economic behaviorism. ## The Objection from Preference Persistence *"People have stable preferences that persist across time. I've preferred coffee to tea for decades. I consistently choose mountains over beaches for vacation. These patterns are not random fluctuations in internal state; they are enduring features of who I am. Your framework, by emphasizing moment-to-moment alliesthetic variation, cannot account for this stability."* The objection correctly identifies that preferences exhibit regularities across time. But it misidentifies the nature of these regularities. In the constructed value framework, what we call "preferences" are not essential properties of selves---intrinsic features lodged in an unchanging core. They are *patterns*: regularities in the relationship between organism and environment that emerge across many occasions of value construction. Consider your preference for coffee. This is not a single stable state but a pattern that emerges from many individual encounters: mornings when fatigue meets caffeine, afternoons when ritual provides comfort, social occasions when coffee signals belonging. Each encounter is an occasion of value construction, shaped by the internal state at that moment. The pattern---"I prefer coffee"---is a summary of these encounters, not a cause of them. Patterns persist because the conditions that generate them persist. Your physiology has regularities: you wake in similar states, you metabolize caffeine similarly, your circadian rhythms repeat. Your environment has regularities: coffee is available, tea is available, the social meanings persist. The interaction of regular organism with regular environment produces regular outcomes. But the regularity is in the pattern of interactions, not in a hidden preference-essence. This reframing has consequences. It explains why preferences can change---when organism or environment changes, the pattern shifts. It explains why preferences can be context-dependent---the same "preference" may not manifest in unfamiliar settings. It explains why preferences can be surprising---in new situations, the organism may act in ways that seem inconsistent with prior patterns, because the prior pattern emerged from prior conditions. The coffee preference is real. But it is real as a pattern, not as a property. The difference matters for how we model economic behavior: we should expect stability where conditions are stable, and change where conditions change. We should not be surprised when lifelong preferences evaporate in new circumstances, or when novel preferences crystallize rapidly. ## The Objection from Rational Choice *"Economics has made tremendous progress by modeling agents as optimizers---entities that choose actions to maximize expected utility given their beliefs and preferences. This framework is mathematically precise, generates testable predictions, and underlies centuries of economic theory. You propose to replace it with... what? Organisms stumbling toward equilibrium? How is this an improvement?"* The objection assumes that rational choice theory is the benchmark against which alternatives must be measured. But the benchmark has problems of its own. Rational choice requires that agents *have* preferences that are complete (they can rank any two alternatives), transitive (if A is preferred to B and B to C, then A is preferred to C), and stable (they don't change arbitrarily during the analysis). It requires that agents *know* these preferences introspectively. It requires that agents *calculate* the expected utility of available options. It requires that agents *select* the option with highest expected utility. Each of these requirements is empirically dubious. Real humans exhibit incomplete preferences, intransitive choices, shifting valuations. They do not know their preferences in advance; they discover them through action. They do not calculate expected utilities; they use heuristics, rules of thumb, imitation, and impulse. They often do not select optimal options even when these are identified. Behavioral economics has catalogued hundreds of "anomalies"---deviations from rational choice predictions. These include loss aversion, framing effects, present bias, anchoring, availability bias, and many more. The standard response has been to treat these as *errors*---departures from the rational benchmark that need special explanation. Constructed value theory offers a different response: there is no deviation from rationality because there is no prior rational agent to deviate from. The organism is not trying and failing to maximize utility. It is constructing value through interaction, shaped by internal states and environmental affordances. Consider the phenomenon of loss aversion---the finding that losses loom larger than equivalent gains. From the rational choice perspective, this is a bias, a departure from the neutral evaluation that utility theory assumes. From the constructed value perspective, it is a predictable consequence of embodied existence. Organisms that treat losses and gains symmetrically would be outcompeted by organisms that prioritize avoiding losses, because in evolutionary environments, losses often meant death while gains merely meant abundance. The asymmetry is not a bug; it is a feature of embodied valuation. We do not propose that agents are "stumbling toward equilibrium" in some random or purposeless way. We propose that agents are engaging their environment through sensory-motor interaction, shaped by physiological states, responding to affordances, constructing value through transaction. This is purposive activity---but the purpose is not utility maximization. The purpose is the ongoing maintenance of the organism-environment coupling, of which economic behavior is one expression. ## The Objection from Meaning and Culture *"Your framework is relentlessly biological, reducing economic behavior to physiology and physics. But humans are not merely organisms; they are meaning-making beings embedded in cultures. A wedding ring has value not because of its metal content but because of what it symbolizes. A national currency has value because of shared belief, not because of any intrinsic property. Your framework cannot account for the symbolic, cultural, and interpretive dimensions of economic life."* This objection correctly identifies a gap in the exposition so far, but misidentifies its implications. Meaning is real. Culture is real. Symbols shape behavior. The wedding ring *does* derive value from what it symbolizes, and that symbolism is culturally constituted. But meaning and culture are not disembodied abstractions floating free of physical reality. They are *embodied* in brains, *inscribed* in artifacts, *enacted* through practices. The wedding ring's meaning exists because human nervous systems respond to it in particular ways, because social practices surround it, because other artifacts (wedding ceremonies, marriage laws, romantic narratives) reinforce its significance. From the enactive perspective we are drawing on, meaning is not added to a meaningless physical world as an extra layer. Meaning emerges from the coupling of organism and environment. The ring *affords* certain actions (wearing, displaying, exchanging) and *precludes* others (selling, discarding, ignoring). These affordances are shaped by cultural context---the ring affords different things in different cultures---but they are still affordances: possibilities for action directly perceived. Cultural affordances are real affordances. The fact that a piece of paper is "money" in one society and "waste" in another does not make its value arbitrary or merely subjective. It means that the affordance structure---what the paper enables and prevents---is different in different contexts. But in each context, the organism perceives and responds to real affordances, not to arbitrary constructions. Bitcoin is an instructive case. Its value is not derived from cultural convention in the way a fiat currency's value might be. It emerges from the specific affordances of the protocol: the scarcity enforced by the 21 million cap, the auditability of the ledger, the permissionless access, the thermodynamic security. These are not cultural meanings imposed on neutral substrate; they are properties of the scaffold that enable specific kinds of interaction. This does not mean culture is irrelevant. The decision to adopt Bitcoin, to trust the network, to participate in the ecosystem---these are shaped by social narratives, by information environments, by cultural contexts. But the affordances themselves are not culturally constructed. They are properties of the physical system that humans perceive and act upon. ## The Objection from Predictive Power *"What does constructed value theory give us that we don't already have? Can it predict economic behavior better than existing theories? Can it guide policy more effectively? If not, what is the point of the new framework?"* This is the right question to ask of any theoretical proposal, and we owe a serious answer. Constructed value theory offers three things that existing frameworks do not: **First, mechanism.** Standard economics describes *that* certain patterns occur (diminishing marginal utility, supply and demand, price discovery) without explaining *how* they occur at the level of physical process. Constructed value theory grounds these patterns in the interaction of embodied organisms with their environment. We can trace the causal chain from interoception through action through transaction to trace. This is not merely description; it is mechanism. **Second, epistemic reorientation.** By shifting focus from unobservable preferences to observable traces, constructed value theory changes what counts as evidence. We no longer need to infer what people "really want" from their behavior; we study the behavior and its consequences directly. This makes economic analysis more empirical and less speculative. **Third, new avenues.** If value construction is embodied, then variables that affect embodiment should affect valuation. This opens research programs: How do physiological states (hunger, fatigue, arousal) affect economic behavior? How do interface designs (friction, affordance clarity) shape transaction patterns? How do environmental conditions (scarcity, abundance, uncertainty) modulate value construction? These questions become tractable when value is understood as embodied interaction rather than disembodied preference. We do not claim that constructed value theory will replace all existing economics overnight. We claim that it offers a perspective that complements and enriches existing approaches. For some questions---particularly those involving the relationship between human organisms and economic scaffolds like Bitcoin---it may prove especially illuminating. ## The Deeper Point: Dissolving Dualisms Behind several of these objections lies a common structure: a dualism between mind and world, subject and object, internal and external. The objection from behaviorism assumes that we must either privilege internal states (mentalism) or deny them (behaviorism). The objection from rational choice assumes that we must model either abstract optimizers or random stumbling. The objection from culture assumes that meaning is either physical or cultural, not both. Constructed value theory dissolves these dualisms rather than choosing sides. The organism and the environment are not separate domains that must somehow be bridged. They are aspects of a single coupled system. The organism shapes its environment through action; the environment shapes the organism through affordance. Value is not located in the object (as labor theory would have it) or in the subject (as utility theory claims). Value is constructed at the interface---at the moment of transaction, where organism and environment meet. This is Wittgensteinian in spirit. The philosophical puzzles about value---"Where is it? What is it? How can we measure it?"---dissolve when we stop treating value as a thing and start treating it as an activity. The question "What is value?" is replaced by "What is valuing?"---and the answer is: valuing is what happens when embodied organisms interact with their environment, leaving traces that accumulate into stratigraphy. ## The Ledger as Mirror and Record We can now return to the image with which we began this inquiry: the ledger as reflective surface and stratigraphic record. The ledger does not care about preferences. It does not store utilities. It does not calculate optima. It simply records transactions---the traces of value construction as they occur. Each transaction is the footprint of an organism that acted, motivated by internal states we cannot see, shaped by environmental affordances we can study. The ledger reflects back to us the aggregate of these actions. It shows us the state of play---who holds what, who has transacted with whom, what patterns have emerged. This reflection is not a judgment; it is a mirror. The abacus does not evaluate; it counts. But the counting is powerful. By accumulating traces, the ledger creates a stratigraphy that can be studied. We can ask: What transactions occurred? How did they accumulate? What patterns emerged? What does the current state tell us about the history that produced it? This is economics as geology: reading the record of sedimented activity to understand the forces that shaped it. ## Resolving the Lingering Puzzle We began the book with a puzzle: Why does Bitcoin have value? This question seemed to require either locating value in the object (intrinsic value) or in the subject (subjective utility), and neither answer seemed satisfactory for a digital asset with no physical form (in the naive sense) and no issuing authority. Constructed value theory dissolves the puzzle. Bitcoin has value because value is constructed through transactions, and transactions occur on the Bitcoin scaffold. The scaffold has specific properties---scarcity, auditability, permissionlessness, thermodynamic security---that enable certain kinds of value construction. Organisms perceive these affordances, act upon them, and leave traces. The question "Why does Bitcoin have value?" becomes: "How is value constructed on the Bitcoin scaffold?" And the answer is: through the same process by which value is constructed anywhere---embodied organisms interacting with their environment---but with a scaffold that makes the process unusually visible, verifiable, and permanent. We no longer ask "What is value?" as if seeking a hidden essence. We ask "How does valuing happen?" and we find the answer in the ledger, in the transactions, in the traces of organisms acting in the world.