This!

Bus factor and too many single points of failure. How many lost wallets are out there with a few hundred or thousands of coins from before Bitcoin hit $100?

Single points of failure? Bitcoin is decentralized, like the internet. It’s designed to explicitly avoid points of failure and trusting of node participants.

Lots of Bitcoin has been lost. Good key hygiene should not be taken lightly. What is unfortunate for those losers is fortunate for Bitcoin. As the supply of lost Bitcoin increases the overall scarcity of the asset increases.

There is no single point of failure for a bank account. If you die suddenly, your assigns can petition the court for the assets.

With bitcoin the single point of failure is always your key. That's why every random walk down the timeline leads to 100% of keys lost over the full course of time.

What do you mean it can disappear and nobody will even notice? I can think of a few things but I’d rather not assume. Can you spell it out so I can better reply?

Nothing is backing up bitcoin. Almost nobody is using it to pay for things. If bitcoin went away I don’t think the regular economy wouldn’t notice anything. Only speculators would notice.

Totally. Bitcoin is not a medium of exchange (cash). It’s not useful for payments. Bitcoin is currently a bet that digital scarcity will bring back the concept of saving (SoV) so that people don’t have to invest in equities just to protect their purchasing power. Only the people making this bet will be affected if Bitcoin fails. The monetary system will keep moving forward unaffected. If Bitcoin succeeds, eventually the price will slow down and it can be used for cash. That will have to occur many decades down the road, if it ever occurs.

As for backups, the Bitcoin ledger is likely the most durable dataset that has ever existed. Backups are made daily at every layer across the world and there is no central point of failure in the network.

Shutting down the Bitcoin network would take a world war, and even then the network would survive through backups and the will of network participants to bring it back.

“Only the people making this bet will be affected if Bitcoin fails”

Which means that it’s just a gamble of some insiders.

Does it feel like I’m arguing that point? I’m not.

Speculation is by definition gambling. Investing is also speculation. You have a thesis, and you make returns if that plays out. You lose capital when you are wrong.

Also, I'm not sure what you mean by "insiders" - most of the world can purchase Bitcoin, the software is OSS, the network inspectable, and the evolving thesis and narrative is fully available online.

Bitcoin is the people's money.

Bitcoin may be the people's money but it's price in fiat is controlled by shady cabals like Bitfinex/Tether. It may be the people's money but it certainly isn't the people's value. Dividing those two is a worthwhile exercise. Hiding behind the networks inspectability minimizes all the shady participants that the open network provides for.

Whether or not I agree with your position, I'll give you mad props for sustained and well-reasoned argument.

>Totally. Bitcoin is not a medium of exchange (cash). It’s not useful for payments. That seems entirely contrary to Satoshi Nakamoto's original intent for Bitcoin.

>Abstract. A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.