You can do the same things with a variety of other cryptocurrencies for a fraction of the cost, though.. and it will usually be a lot faster, too.
I'm sorry, but you can't brush that subject off with a single sentence. It's a huge problem. If you want a real currency, that is.
You might hope that the free market will fix this problem, but I have my doubts. The current whales don't have a real incentive to sell.
And if Bitcoin would reach its goal, we would have some new, anonymous and untouchable overlords that would make the feudal ones look like amateurs. No thanks.
Sorry, I suppose I should've been clearer. Inequity is a problem, but not for bitcoin. I meant that since it doesn't (and might never) represent overall wealth that it's not very interesting how some slice of the population holds it.
> If you want a real currency, that is.
I'm okay with Bitcoin being something unlike any previous currency. I'm okay with bitcoin only being used by rich people, only being used by poor people, only being used by technophiles, or only being used by technophobes.
> And if Bitcoin would reach its goal
I doubt there's any consensus on whatever goal that might be. Bitcoin [supporters] like the idea of adoption, but I don't think many would assume it would eliminate the use or need for fiat currencies.
> ... we would have some new, anonymous and untouchable overlords that would make the feudal ones look like amateurs. No thanks.
I don't know how we got here. There's never been a more enabling technology. If in this odd analogy the "serfs" decide they don't like bitcoin they can use some-other-coin-that-they-prefer.
What exactly is backing its value? Is it just marketing fluff?
1 scarcity - limit on supply, difficult to counterfeit
2 fungible - all coins are the same
3 divisibility - 1 / 100 millionth of a bitcoin is smallest unit. crypto is high divisible, an important feature if there is deflation.
4 durability - dollar bills get old and torn up. whereas, computers and drives crash and you can lose your private key.
5 transferability - cash and gold require physical transfer. banking: ACH, credit cards, wire transfers have fees. bitcoin: global internet transferability. transaction time should be less than 10 minutes. fees were low initially but have been going up due to network congestion.
However they main thing that makes a currency valuable is willingness to exchange it for goods and services. That is the useful part about the bitcoin "bubble." It serves to increase adoption of it's usage.
edit: formatting and note about losing keys mention in comment below
However, it's good data regarding how much of the currency being held is put to use and how much is just hold-and-pray/FOMO.
As a supporter of bitcoin, I recognize that there's so little backing its value. Once some piece of devastating news would be released, it could send bitcoin tumbling all the way down to zero. There would not necessarily be any residual value to the currency if the news were bad enough. The only thing I could imagine that would obliterate all the value might be "algo for PoW is vulnerable to trivial double-spend, no software workaround available". The next most significant thing would be "global consensus among UN member states to outlaw cryptocurrency transactions, transactions to carry criminal penalties including imprisonment." But then it would just slip to merely black market use, which would likely preserve some residual value.
Bitcoin's power/lure is: invulnerability+deflationary+novelty+utility+ubiquity.
Invulnerability: its value will fluctuate as demand cycles, but the network will continue to churn out new transactions regardless.
Deflationary: yes, as everyone says this is a bad quality for a currency, but it helps explain why people keep investing.
Novelty: there's some things that you can do with bitcoin that you can't/couldn't ever do before.
Utility: it's a truly useful technology and there's innovation going on to find new ways to leverage it.
Ubiquity: why bitcoin and not other cryptocoins? Its marketing/brand/ubiquity is its strength. Admittedly it is not irresistibly strong. Support for some other coin could easily overtake it (and that's why there's some investors hedging on other coins).