Without that collective belief, owning anything is a huge effort to defend it against whoever else it might appeal to.
It's feels very similar to a game. A serious one at that, with real consequences. It does not have a clear winning and/or losing condition though.
Whereas for your house, no matter what its market value would be you still have the right to live there and prevent others from doing so.
Anyone who's lived through a massive societal upheaval, collectivisation, dictatorship etc can attest to this - your ownership of property only means anything in as much as it's protected. If the state fails, or if society's understanding of private property radically changes then your investment is only valuable if you can hold on to it.
Even in the private-property loving West the value of an individuals property can often turn out to just be the amount that the state decides to pay them when they seize it via eminent domain.
If the value of _dollars_ goes to zero, the house doesn't collapse. The social consensus and enforcement mechanism that protects your right to live there probably does though
That is, the reason that you can call the cops when strangers take over your kitchen is because we have a very real police force, whose are permitted (even required) to use force in order to protect your property. Property may have started out as a collective belief, but the processes put in place over the last few centuries - especially the concept of Rule of Law [3] - have made it very real.
But ISTM that crypto works outside of these norms. From what I can see, it has no effective rule of law; no possibility for the creation of an effective enforcement body. There appear to be no consistently applied consequences of cheating, either intentional (eg, rug-pulls) or not. People seem to steal money using crypto scams all the time [1]; from what I've seen of it, the world of crypto seems to pretty much embody my personal, nightmare interpretation of anarcho-capitalism [2].
So while I agree that property is a collective belief in theory, in practice it has the rule of law, the legitimacy of the state, and the monopolisation of force supporting it. Crypto seems to have none of these things supporting it; I'm yet to be convinced that it is even, actually, property.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legitimacy_(political)
[1] https://web3isgoinggreat.com
In a sense, it sounds like a political party that splits in two. It’s not democratic; maybe it’s technocratic.
In early crypto days there was a general feeling that the "power of math" (i.e. how hard it would be to break various hash/public key algorithms) is the enforcement body and the reason you don't need a government and a police force. Maybe smart people saw through that, or maybe the experiment just had to be done to see how this actually turns out in practice.
Your points are why I thought an official US crypto coin could work. But there is not that much net added value compared to what credit cards offer.
It has been translated into laws and social contracts backed by established enforcement that is sufficiently effective and has been demonstrated to the satisfaction and judgment of most people.
It's true that in the event of nuclear war, this could all evaporate --- but this probabilty is low enough for most people to reasonably ignore. Labeling this a "belief" is thus somewhat disingenous in the fact that it is reason rooted in logic and judgment and probability.
If you find yourself believing that our own social contract is the only logical & rational one, or at least the likely result of social progress, you might try reading Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything. It covers a very wide range of alternatives that all made sense to the people in those societies at the time.
The "logic and reason" here has to do with the fact that the social contract is sufficiently real and functional enough to transcend mere "belief" in most people's lives.
So, the "long dick" of the US government that grand-parent was talking about. Society creates value.
