I agree and this is the argument that I haven’t heard a good response to. If Bitcoin has value and utility, why shouldn’t a second chain, with the same parameters, have roughly equal value and utility?
Gold is on the periodic table of elements. You can’t make another gold.
The value in bitcoin comes from the boatloads of people trusting it enough to use in one form or another. If you spin up a bitcoin fork you'll need a lot of work to get people to believe in your fork.
Sure, but the trust transfers a lot easier than to some completely different cryptocurrency because the only meaningful difference is which protocol the miners and clients accept and which block hash is the root. People trust that bitcoin has value because not many people are going to switch to a new client that e.g. accepts 10^20 bitcoin rewards to miners per block; it's in too few people's self-interest. Or, more specifically, if a group of people do want to issue 10^20 coins every block then the bitcoin protocol serves as a coordination method for them to do that with each other.
Being on the first blockchain has only sentimental and inertial value.
You can’t just spin up another Bitcoin blockchain and expect to have the ecosystem move that chain without sacrificing their hash power on another chain when they’re deeply invested in the original $1 trillion (and growing) chain.
That’s like suggesting Apple move to a copy of the NASDAQ exchange.
That's why I refer to it as a speculative bubble; everyone is betting on how much other art appreciators will pay for artsy bitcoins in the nebulous future.
It's also only moderately explanatory; the original BTC client doesn't work on the current network any more, either. So what does BTC have that BCH doesn't? They share a root block.
That's a great argument, but for BCH (or any other altcoins without a speculation problem) instead of BTC. There's virtually no technical differences between the bitcoin family of cryptocurrencies. That implies that there's no artificial limit on supply of coins, either. Just fork or spin up a new blockchain if there's ever a real supply crunch for cryptocurrency in general.
The BTC mining pools could trivially mount a >50% attack on BCH or any of the other alt-coins, but it's apparently not even worth it for the lulz. All the more reason to use them as simple currencies if that's the case. Any fiat currency issuer would be overjoyed with a 0% interest in counterfeiting.