Isn't the most important thing you want from a store of value stability? Ie, that it'll store the value that you put into it? Bitcoin certainly doesn't have that property.
And if that's not the desired property implied by "store of value", what is?
For example, if you're on any exchange that lists the total amount of orders in BTC, you can easily catch when the manipulation starts by seeing out of the ordinary sums (triple the amount of usual) for open positions.
Not to mention insane bot activity that is equivalent to a DDOS attack on the exchange.
During the last several hours of IOTA pump, exchanges, even the IOTA tangle were, and still are unstable.
doesn't tether fix this?
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#markets
for example, bitcoin is now huge on bithumb, I'd buy it at bitstamp and sell it for 10% more, and repeat. given the slow transaction times, huge fees, large mempool, this is impossible to do.
exchanges also ban you for trying to do arbitrage too, so there's a risk of losing all the funds.
It's also not impossible to trade via bitstamp and bitthumb, sure it may take an hour or so to get your btc from bitstamp to bitthumb but that's not the bottleneck. Once you sell on bitthumb for USD you need to get that USD back to bitstamp. So you have to get it from a Korean Bank to your own account and then to bitstamps European bank account. Best case scenario that route takes 5-10 working days so the BTC network taking an hour or so to confirm is the least if your problems.
As for transfer times for BTC not being a problem, 1 hour is a gamble in cryptocurrency world.
Or should I be parsing the phrase to mean "It's not anything today, but in the long term, once the market cap is large enough, it'll be a store of value"?
(I'm not being snarky; I'm legitimately confused by what people mean by the phrase.)
I am being snarky: They mean "you better hurry up and buy some bitcoin quick, so I can have some new bagholders"
That said, if the trend of wild volatility were to continue into the long term it would indeed prove to be a poor store of value, but market speculation would indicate as such long before we were to get there (assuming we pick now as the period delta starting point for a "long term").
A stable currency is far more usable to me. Bitcoin is very similar to gold at the moment, in that I'm as likely to use it as I am to carry around bricks of gold in my pocket. For different reasons, sure, but the net result is the same.
So if something has been rising for 6 months, it cannot dip below that point, because of your opinion.
Too bad we did not have your opinion in 1929 or 2008 or 2013 (Mt Gox). Would've saved us.
How about businesses like Steam ditching Bitcoin support?
How about Bitfinex not backing up their fake currency called tether?
Obviously this is not even noise compared to bitcoin; but my point is that bitcoin has shown to be an exceptional store of value for a long term hold.
Beyond that, I think most people who believe in bitcoin as a long term store of value expect that when it reaches a mature global-level market cap; the swings should be less severe.