This is not cut and dry as to whether it is a benefit or not. Many people, myself included, don't consider it a benefit. Not having control over your currency makes it that much harder to respond in times of recession. Greece was hit quite hard by the Great Recession, and one of the reasons why is because they didn't have control over their currency, and so they couldn't lower the value of it. The Euro was still valued high due to the use by Germany and France.
"Huge sums can be transferred globally at the speed of light with very low fees."
Currently that's not true of Bitcoin, either. Transactions are slow, and fees are not low.
"The electricity it takes to maintain it is nothing compared to the rest of the banking system."
Is it? It takes a crazy amount of power, for what seems to be something that only a small amount of people are using, with a very anemic transaction throughput.
Transactions are very fast and very low compared to traditional currency. Often it takes days to move money between banks, or will cost you much more than a bitcoin transaction fee to move faster.
Again, bitcoin could have 100x the users and the power requirements would be negligible compared to banking. There is no 'scale up' power wise needed for bitcoin.
Some people, not all people. And that's why I said that it unsure whether that's an actual value or not.
"Transactions are very fast and very low compared to traditional currency. Often it takes days to move money between banks, or will cost you much more than a bitcoin transaction fee to move faster."
No, not really. Credit card transactions are far, far faster than a Bitcoin one. Bank transfers in Europe are quite fast, too.
"Again, bitcoin could have 100x the users and the power requirements would be negligible compared to banking. There is no 'scale up' power wise needed for bitcoin."
You're gonna have to provide a citation for this.
Stop proving that Bitcoin enthusiasts don't understand economics.
Are you saying that the intrinsic value of gold is the price manufacturers of "useful" products from gold are willing to pay for it?
Scarcity relative to demand pushes up market prices (i.e. extrinsic value) but that's something entirely different...
Then what is the number? No, scarcity is an important attribute that contributes to perceived value, but it's not intrinsic. Otherwise any cryptocurrency that is scarce would have intrinsic value, as opposed to the many that are essentially 0.
> Most importantly it can't be created/destroyed at will by a central government.
Couldn't someone destroy/steal my BTC wallet though? I'd have no recourse for justice, right? Also, doesn't the Federal Reserve print money mostly at will?
> Huge sums can be transferred globally at the speed of light with very low fees.
I think the speed claim here is totally false[1].
> With normal currency a wire transfer costs money
Don't all BTC transactions have confirmation fees?
> and moving a lot of money from a bank account usually takes days.
This is true crypto currencies shine here. It can take 20 minutes to transfer $5 or $5,000,000.
> The electricity it takes to maintain it is nothing compared to the rest of the banking system.
Maybe, but also maybe not. The rest of the banking system provides lots of services and protections that crypto currencies don't.
> These properties are the very nature of crypto, that's why it's intrinsic.
These are properties of crypto currencies for sure, but that these are valuable properties is entirely subjective.
Also, unlike cash, you're making your transaction history public. Any central government in the world can see this. You have to jump through a lot of hoops and use multiple blockchains to anonymize your Bitcoins.
Transfers incur a network fee with Bitcoin as well. I doubt anyone making a small purchase wants to pay fees that might be a significant percentage of, or exceed, their purchase subtotal.
You cannot send Bitcoins "at the speed of light". On average, the Bitcoin network processes 7 transactions per second.