Seems a bit Orwellian to suggest that bitcoin is money printed from thin air. Yes, bitcoin was instantiated at some point, but at that point it had pretty much zero value. It has a fixed rate of issuance which will eventually end, and no one can change that. It is the opposite of fiat in that respect.

Actually, developers can change the limited issuance. Some group of developers, and their interested backers, will probably hard fork in 2024 and change the protocol to permit more to be mined. There will be inevitable "that's not Bitcoin" debates, but there will be a chain with old and new bitcoins on it for a little while anyway.

That's theoretical at the moment, and it's probably unlikely that it would win out as all the current holders of bitcoin would lose value. Even if it did though, it would be based on market consensus rather than a secret meeting room.

Bitcoin supply is finite. When you say "literally printed money"; you couldn't have come up with a poorer choice of words when discussing a digital currency with limited supply.

If you look at any crypto exchange, you will see BTC-fiat currency pairs for USD, EUR, CNY, JPY, etc. Not sure what more of an "attachment to fiat" you could ask for.

Bitcoin’s market cap has three main components:

- speculation, as you say (sells outside a window)

- savings (sells after a period of time)

- float to cover transactions (sells continuously but also buys continuously, netting out to a stable holding)

They are all somewhat interrelated... speculation decreases savings value if it has volatility on a timescale bigger than typical vests. Float is constituted in part by the other two, although much of its cap is pure in/our money transfers. Speculators get most of their value from other speculators, but also react to changes in the float and savings market.

And any individual transaction will usually be some combination of the three. A saver might also be hoping for some return on top of the storage value. Someone who is moving money overseas might leave it in BTC for some additional time if they don’t have a better place to store that money.

Still, the mix of those motivations will lead to very different trading profiles. And only a small portion of those decisions are deterministic on the spot price of BTC, which is why calling them “100% speculative” is wrong.

Its not just printed, you need to expend real world resources to mint it (energy, computers)

Bitcoin has a fixed supply. Its more like a commodity. It isnt infinitely divisible and still useful (because of fees.)