All right, then - how is it productive?
A short time ago all currency was on the gold standard. Then it was loosely based on the underlying productivity of the country that issued the currency. Then it was loosely based on the underlying safety of the country that issued the currency. Even gold has bounced around in value.
Having said that, I am still not convinced that bitcoin is a viable monetary standard. There is no way (that I can see) to evaluate its underlying value. Underlying value is needed for trust. Trust is needed for exchanging goods and services. Monetary standards are just stand ins for barter.
Please convince me.
People are going into work every day to work on crypto-related products. Bitcoin & other cryptocurrencies are putting food on the table for those people.
Scamming people can also put food on your table. Stealing can put food on your table. Neither is particularly productive.
based 100% on people trying to make a quick buck, and not based on solving a problem virtually anyone actually has.
by this bar, Dutch tulips in the 1600s were also extremely productive
More productive work has been done by Bitcoin devs and users than much of the normal finace work and money spent when it comes to investment and future value creation though experimentation right now. To dismiss all of that as nonproductive is ridiculous because it is very clearly extremely productive. This is true regardless of how much money an investment in Bitcoin might make.
If people were honest, they'd admit that Bitcoin is flawed, that it was never intended or conceived as the perfect realized implementation of a digital currency, etc. It's a thought experiment that grew rapidly out of control.
The Lightning Network is a good example of an earnest try to make something workable out of Bitcoin, but even that has real difficulty overcoming some of bitcoin's core design flaws, which are: a) difficulty mechanism blocking out commodity miners and essentially assuring there will always be centralization, which means network security will always be dubious at best, fees will always be high, and other undesirable consequences; b) inability to provide reliable, rapid transaction confirmations; c) inherent scalability difficulties based on the amount of work needed to verify transactions.
Lightning networks address some of this for some partners, but even for those who find lightning networks a reasonable workaround (that is, those with sufficient btc to open, maintain, and populate mutual funding channels), there are additional negative trade-offs that make the process undesirable (if the counterparty can prevent them from crying 'foul' within the settlement deadline, a lot of money can be successfully stolen).
Continued insistence on Bitcoin/blockchain deployment as such is non-productive. Lessons should be extracted from the bitcoin experience and we should move on to something that tries to resolve Bitcoin's fundamental issues. Let's accept Bitcoin's role as a thought leader and early implementation of digital currency, but stop pretending that it's ever going to be useful as a major economic backbone.