Going from memory, a recent Bloomberg article called Bitcoin: "Gold for millennials".
Or, similarly, Peter Thiel said recently [1]: "it's like a reserve form of money, it's like gold, and it's just a store of value. You don't need to use it to make payments."
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/26/bitcoin-underestimated-peter...
"Market cap size is critical for adoption of a store of value. It needs to be large enough to “fit” even very large amounts of fiat, ideally without affecting the market. Gold market cap is estimated at 7 trillion USD, which means that even the richest people can move all their assets into gold and not move the market. (At least one at a time. All of them at once will move the market big time).
Bitcoin market cap of about 70B USD is not large enough for even one of the richest people on the planet. This implies that if the market cap does not grow, Bitcoin is likely to fail as store of value."
I wonder if much of the medium term success of Bitcoin has been because the money put in couldn't be laundered readily in any other way, so whilst Bitcoin is a relatively high risk the alternative was just to dump the money without a way to use it?
People actually use other currencies as a medium of exchange first, and store of value second (usually they purchase assets to store value long term).
Bitcoin is the other way round (at present at least).
BTC with its fixed supply works the opposite direction, devoid of inflation: you'd rather keep your BTC as a store of value that will increase, than spend it on goods you can still buy later for fewer BTC.
From a purely economic perspective, cash is just another liquid asset. The distance from currency to store of value is quite short.
Physical assets are generally regarded as stores of value, however, in modern times, currency stability has resulted in currency supplanting durable goods as the primary store of value.
Yes, you would. I'm not clear what you mean by it here:
If you mean Bitcoin, you're agreeing with my point, it's a good store of value first (modulo price volatility and external risks)
If you mean Fiat, don't do that long term, use assets.
And why would it matter what's the "intended" usage of it? Who determines intent? Might every holder of the asset/currency/property (whatever one calls it) have different intentions for it?