Government bonds have been around for hundreds of years but I can't buy coffee with them. Thus they don't do anything.
Fair enough. Government bonds let countries deficit spend. They are also a stable store of value. These attributes make them useful.
Bitcoin is neither of these. Like government bonds, it does not behave like money.
Bitcoin is however similar to a government bond in that it a) has value, b) is not directly useful for consumer transactions. Also, I dunno that behaving like money can be put in such stark binary terms.
Nothing is eternal. That doesn’t make everything ephemeral equally risky. Bitcoin is a speculative asset. Speculative assets are volatile by design (you want them to go up).
More critically, government bonds’ role as a store of value is ancillary to their core purpose: to enable public deficit spending.
> Bitcoin is however similar to a government bond in that it a) has value, b) is not directly useful for consumer transactions
My cat has value and is useless for consumer transactions. That doesn’t make him a government bond.
For which there (a) is zero evidence and yet (b) are lots of unsophisticated investors throwing money at. This combination is well known in financial engineering circles, which has had a habit of dreaming up assets with inobservable specialness since the days of John Law.