It is speculation, however, as you generally don't have the same sort of insight into currency movements as you will into stock movements and commodities in general. Someone watching the Brexit vote in summer 2016 would have made a decent return on ARS had they moved it to the USD before the vote and back after (changed from 1USD:13ARS to 1USD:15ARS practically overnight). But that is speculation and requires watching global and national scale events to predict.
Investing is what you do when you're not merely speculating on short-term returns, but are instead focused on long-term value creation. It is right to call it currency speculation, because instead of investing capital to create sustainable growth in something, you're just skimming the fluctuations using massive leverage.
Note: Not a finance person, just a personal opinion.
That's a contradiction.
Regardless, what defines speculation is not parasitism, it's uncertainty. And there's uncertainty in any investment as well. That's why there's no clear line between the two.
Go read my original post again. I am advocating against ambiguity in language, as this serves to obscure analysis. You are clearly happy to obliterate distinction, however, and have made no attempt at a positive argument why it is beneficial to discourse.
Language is a constant negotiation about the meaning of words, and I have made my position clear.
We can only communicate to the extent that we agree on the definitions of words, so for you to invent your own definitions, which contradict how other people use the word, as codified in dictionaries, then there's zero hope of reaching shared understanding.
It would be absurd for me to claim that "the sky is brown", the later argue that I was right all along because I'm defining "brown" to be "blue".
I found this thinking about my home land - India..
Although it might seem that buying dollars have a return of 20% or more in a year, by the time you sell it everything cost more in ARS because most prices are tied to US dollars. So you end up having the same. If you have saved in ARS, with the same money you could buy a lot less things
By now it's very clear, it can't be medium of exchange.
You can say what you want about the philosophy of that - the lightning network will add yet another group of people who collectively have an outsized control over the network. But if the scaling issues get addressed I don't see any reason why it couldn't work as a currency. And it looks like they are being (slowly) addressed.
Blockstream struck down a modest increase to 2MB in November. They have devs who want to reduce the blocksize. I'm not sure where you're finding hope in LN.
Bitcoin Cash forked off to get back to scaling, and it's doing great. Check out how well the mempool stress test went this past week.
Current prevailing theory in BCH land is the block size is an unnecessary hinderance, and will likely be gone in the next 18 months.
Exciting times!
What are you smoking? Even 1GB blocks would be 144GB per day of blockchain growth. You can't expect people to tolerate that kind of disk usage, let alone bandwidth.
By the time they're necessary, it'll be a lot less demanding, relatively speaking....
"A speculator is a person who trades derivatives, commodities, bonds, equities or currencies with a higher than average risk in return for a higher-than-average profit potential" https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/speculator.asp
Perhaps it's 'accidental investing with a dose of roulette number thrown in'.
Perhaps it's a new type of investment/gambling hybrid that requires a new category.
If the currency does well but the company does badly, you still win. If the currency does badly but the company does well, you still lose.
You're exposed to the fluctuations of the currency, and completely unexposed to the valuation of the company.
I'm not trying to sugar-coat or rationalize the mania, only trying to explore the idea that this is both and neither gambling and investing.
I think people object to the idea that money used to purchase crypto currency in the first place is capital.
Following Investopedia 'Currency is a generally accepted form of money, including coins and paper notes, which is issued by a government and circulated within an economy. Used as a medium of exchange for goods and services, currency is the basis for trade.'
crypto is not generally accepted form of money; not issued by a government; circulated within economy - somehow yes.
So they don't fulfill all the requirements.
I always thought of it as "otherwise value-less representation of value." All the currency I can think of fits this definition - including gold! Gold is only really valuable recently for circuits and the like.
Thinking the world will flock to a fixed pool of frictionless digital exchange does not seem insane to me. I'm talking about the ones you can transact for less than a penny (BCH), not the old guard (BTC).
Fees are less than a penny. System works great, like Bitcoin used to.
Block size as much as makes sense, optimizations where possible, if lightning works (it won't) - use it.
Gavin Andresen has published about his latest work 'Graphene' which shrinks block sizes dramatically.
They'll take/use any good ideas so long as it doesn't cripple basic onchain functionality.
Blocksize and fees are a tradeoff.
1 cent fees are a significant advantage over 20$ fees.
But 0.0001 cent fees aren't really that much more useful for your coffee transactions.
Sure, maybe someone will come up with another chain that is used for true micro transactions.
But what we are saying is, that each of these fee levels are good for different use cases.
Bitcoin's high fees and high security are great for a digital gold product that isn't traded much.
Bitcoin Cash made a different tradeoff in the attempt to go after the daily spending market.
Pros and cons.