Bitcoin Is Near All-Time Highs and the Mainstream Doesn't Care Yet

To justify Bitcoin specifically you'd need to explain why it in particular should be the one-and-only (or at least, one of a fixed and finite set). A government could do it by fiat, and it wouldn't surprise me to see a government bless some cryptocurrency as its default transaction mechanism. A stablecoin could do it by piggybacking off a government fiat.

It's not impossible that the population as a whole could simply land on Bitcoin, much the way a government exists by the collective consensus of the people living there. But I don't see that as being very likely, since there are too many alternatives. It has the first-mover advantage and might just succeed, but I consider other cryptocurrencies more likely.

Bitcoin is seeing essentially no use as currency (in the sense of medium of exchange, rather than speculative good).

> Unable to be manipulated [...] governments [...] will print trillions on a whim.

Bitcoin do not get printed on a whim, it's true. But this year, Tether volume has increased from $4B to $18B, and the timing of those Tether backed Bitcoin purchases has certainly been awfully convenient for the Bitcoin price.

> I can send thousands of dollars worth of bitcoin

"worth" is doing a lot of work in your sentence. You can convert your dollars into cryptocurrencies quickly. You can transfer the cryptocurrencies at a reasonable speed. But converting the cryptocurrency back into regular money, and the exchange rate at which you will be able to do so, are entirely different questions, and not necessarily ones with favorable answers for the customer.

> Large sums of bitcoin I can securely hold

Unless you have the misfortune to live in an active war zone, I find it hard to think of a LESS safe way to hold large amounts of money than cryptocurrency.

> This entire system is out in the open for inspection.

Yeah, right! The typical crypto company was funded by an Estonian teenager, backed by a consortium of Colombian drug lords, and two years into the operation, it turns out that the only copy of the password to the cold wallet was lost in a botched Visual Basic upgrade, and now the CFO is missing, presumed dead after a luging accident in the Cayman Islands.

You must be thinking of Bitcoin Cash. Only BCH follows the original design and intention of the Bitcoin White Paper to be Peer-to-Peer digital cash, the BTC chain was co-opted years ago by Blockstream and has been perverted into some wildly expensive settlement layer for their own 2nd layer products.

If value investing doesn't appeal, you can absolutely play speculation games against all of the other people playing speculation games. Value investing is dull and plodding, and to be honest, the usual advice about index funds feels hollow on a day when the S&P 500's P/E is pushing 40.

But I, personally, would rather leave my money in a bank account than play speculation games in any asset. I just don't have the stomach for it. If you do, I wish you the best of luck.

I can see an end-state in which Bitcoins reach a tipping point that they would become a default for transactions. That would give them a basis for value, the total value of all the world's transactions divided by the total base if Bitcoins (yadda yadda velocity of money and other hand-wavey stuff; I'm not doing the math here since that's not the point).

I consider that unlikely for a number of reasons. Some are technical (the weight of Bitcoin is so high that most people end up using an online provider, which is no easier than just using any other spending app) and some economic/political (if blockchain really works for currency, a government could easily set one up by fiat without rewarding speculators in any existing cryptocurrency).

While that end-state could happen, a stablecoin gets there faster. People could buy and use a stablecoin today, without making every transaction a speculation. Of all the cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin attracts the most attention, and is most driven by speculation rather than any kind of store of value. While Bitcoin's notoriety could be the reason it becomes the one that stands out, I believe that it's more likely to be a different one (most likely a stablecoin, probably backed by a government).

So there, I explained my reasoning. It could be wrong, and if so, it will hopefully be clear where. There will be no reason for me to either feign ignorance or double down: I'd be more interested in learning the lesson of what I missed than defending my ego. It costs nothing to my ego to be wrong, only in failing to learn.

Or @usdcoinprinter on Twitter

The technical differences between the two metrics are a bit above my pay grade, although they roughly track each other.