For me, buying and holding seems to be legitimate usage. I guess that would count as "speculating". What else should you do with a store of value that you expect to appreciate in price because it has inflation going to 0?
Do you expect to increase in price solely because there are a limited amount? There are many things which have that property, but are not good stores of value. Your ability to sell it later for more money is based on continuing demand. Unless there's some other use case, where is that demand going to come from? Isn't some of the value it is allegedly storing based on future expectations of utility?
I really do wonder why Bloomberg hates Bitcoing. If you read through a history of their articles, they REALLY hate it.
I'm asking why BTC value should keep going up without some sort of demand beyond people buying because they expect it to go up? Or do you think that's enough?
You've had an answer for gold and silver and you've just said it's a store of value because it's a store of value. That's circular logic.
On the opposite end of the spectrum you’ve got South American cultures that loved Gold for purely decorative purposes, but basically never considered it money. These cultures largely traded using barter or using a specific agricultural product as the unit of account, such as cacao beans.
Hence the Opium Wars, the only way for UK/USA to get silver out of the Chinese economy. China had no interest in sub-standard Western goods and only wanted silver in exchange for their fine porcelain, silk and other goodies. Getting the whole nation on drugs and defending that trade with gunboats was a way of getting silver, silver being needed in the West for paying soldiers/mercenaries.
Such proud history we have, enslaving India to get the opium, selling it in China and getting silver back to buy legit goods from China.
1 or 21 million does not really make a difference, as long as they are infinitely divisible.
It depends on the price. If the price if above what it's "real" value will be (after factoring in later deflation), then you'd sell it.
Also there is a difference in short term and long term. In short term one might sell only to buy again after corrections, but this is risky/hard to time.
Rarity does not confer value. My toenail clippings are limited in quantity, but valueless. There has to be some sort of underlying demand before rarity gets to play a factor in the pricing equation.
So for bitcoin, what has been the underlying value proposition to justify purchasing? A large part of it was that bitcoin is the future of money, and that once “mass adoption” began, the price would go up.
Of course, bitcoin is a miserable failure of a currency. It doesn’t have properties that most consumers and vendors want. So this leaves us with “bitcoin has no inflation”, which is as I’ve mentioned above, not a good reason for anything to be valuable.
Indistinguishable from other toe-nail clippings, for which supply is not limited. Not easy to transport internationally quickly.
Ok, that makes sense. So why is there more hashing power on bitcoin than the hard forks? Oh, because bitcoin is more valuable and so the mining reward is higher once converted to fiat? Well, that seems like a problem.
And bitcoin is easy to move internationally, but that’s just begging the question. Why would anyone want to move bitcoin? Presumably because it’s valuable, but now we have a circular dependency; bitcoin is valuable because you can move it internationally, and people want to move it internationally because it’s valuable and can be converted into currencies in which people can actually buy goods and services.