You missed one use case which is digital gold, which accounts for most of the price.
Also, gold is shiny. Personally, I'd much rather have a gold bar in my safe, that I could take out and hold in my hands, than a memory stick with some Bitcoin on it.
https://hacked.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/gold-commodity...
There is a lot of money looking for a place to go and be safe (from loss and inflation). There are very few 'pure' ways to simply store that value, even gold is difficult to invest in, at least if you want actual ownership and not merely a promissory note. Bitcoin (or another cryptocurrency) could be one of these ways.
I have a hard time understanding digital scarcity. Bitcoins are scarce with respect to "the" Bitcoin network, but there's nothing preventing someone from forking or starting their own clone of the entire system. While that new chain would be missing all the historic transactions of the original, is that meaningful in any important way with respect to scarcity?
The number of cells in an Excel spreadsheet are also finite, but we don't tend to impart value on them. And it's trivial to create a new spreadsheet with a whole new set of cells. What am I missing?
Bitcoin code has been forked thousands of times. Only a few forks survive today, and those are worth a small fraction of the original.
That's because Bitcoin, like all money, is a social construct. It's an idea and belief shared among many people. Bitcoin, like all money, has no intrinsic value, but derives value from the network of people who find it useful.
It's much more difficult to fork a network of people and shared beliefs than it is to fork the code.
And I'll preempt the inevitable argument that dollars and renminbi are backed by the military, or by taxes, or by central banks, etc. That's all hogwash. Money isn't backed by anything other than shared belief and the promises we make to each other.
But my question was about Bitcoin's comparison to gold, specifically with respect to its scarcity.