I just don't get it - we're all holding pieces of this stuff because it keeps going up in value because we're all holding pieces of it? And that's somehow worth the enormous computing cost to maintain the network?
Yeah, I'm sure that BTC is great if you're a Syrian refugee or a billionaire evading capital controls but it feels like the majority of the stuff is just... sitting there...
I'm actually really thankful that exchanges are in the picture because ledger-only transactions aren't nearly as wasteful as on-chain transactions, but still don't understand why people want it. A cryptocurrency seems useful to me, inflationary crypto-assets seem like their only use is to reward early adopters?
The value proposition of BTC seems more-or-less like "there is a limited supply and more people will want some in the future because it has made some people rich".
It gives you the ability to actually save your money for a future use. If you need liquidity, you can borrow against it to spend money in other endavors.
Nobody wants to bring their coins to their grave, but whatever you spend it on needs to bring more value than this just sitting there, which means you would expect a lot of unprofitable or very low profit investments to go away (ex: empty housing used as real estate investment in Vancouver).
Emeralds are not digital, they are not that fungible, you can't easily divide them, no guarantees on supply, etc, etc.
Also if you look at it historically, it has been the best performing asset in 10 years out of it's 12 year existence which kind of reinforces people's beliefs.
Mayyyybe. I don't think that's why most people are buying it, though. I think it's your last point.
> Also if you look at it historically, it has been the best performing asset in 10 years out of it's 12 year existence which kind of reinforces people's beliefs.
Yeah, this is what gets me. BTC is valuable because BTC is valuable. I don't understand why that loop doesn't unroll, and it breaks my brain a bit. I can't think of anything else that has value _only_ because it has made other people wealthy, and that has so consistently appreciated off of that fact.
The idea that an asset needs _no_ intrinsic value in order to be valuable, or that the intrinsic value may have been defined a long time ago and is now irrelevant to its current value just doesn't compute to me.
If you want to, you could argue that the energy spent in mining the coin is the intrinsic value.
Intrinsic value isn't as important in my opinion, what matters is what other people think and agree on.
Because then he'd need to name an actual different reason to hate on bitcoin that hasn't been debunked