The handful of actual non-investment transactions are nowhere near enough to support a 100bn valuation.
And that's why I'm not in BTC...looks like a bubble, smells like a bubble and I'm sure it quacks too.
How much value do people want to tx in a censorship resistant, non-percentage charging transfer system?
How many tx currently cost more than they would if bitcoin was widely accepted?
How many people want to buy gold but don't want to have third party trust with an organization that holds gold or have to hold it themselves.
If bitcoin exists it's price discovery period then the use cases above give it value.
How is this different with Bitcoin? Edit: by which i mean, either you work out what do do with the key, or you trust an exchange/online wallet provider to do it for you.
This equivalent is logistically impossible with bitcoin and the more nodes the stronger it becomes to resisting censorship. They would literally have to buy every single bitcoin (probably at tremendous price increase) and throw away the private key. Even leaving just 1 satoshi would render this plan completely useless. And because around %15 or so of the bitcoins have been lost to los USB drives or forgotten passwords, etc that a government would never know how many are still in legit wallets. Plus satoshi has a million..
A recent example was the bank of cyprus in 2013.
If a third party controls your assets then those assets are under greater risk.
That exactly is my point. You list usage cases - but nobody is USING it.
Unless there is a meteoric increase in real world usage (i.e. non speculative) to match the valuations the whole crypto world is going to have a very ugly surprise.
You know what's a sure sign of a bubble? When people not even remotely in that world start asking me about this bitcoin thing - they heard it only goes up and it's easy money. Zero notion as to what it is beyond that. How's that for price discovery?