It’s a deflationary store of value, it does make sense to invest some into it.
The value comes from being able to manipulate the price, one would suppose.
I suppose there are now some whales, including governments that seized BTC from criminals, that could induce a crash by selling thousands of BTC within a short frame of time. But that may be true for many stocks as well.
It depends on the trading volume. For many "altcoins" or "shitcoins" it may be true, because they have low trading volume. Bitcoin probably less so these days.
I'd read elsewhere that there was a tiny minority of BTC holders that own 95% of it, no idea of the authenticity of that.
As a Layman, my assumption is the more liquidity in the market, the harder it would be to manipulate and less reason to dump onto the market if a large stakeholder.
But I think the same applies to many stocks. If Musk of Bezos would sell off a majority of their shares in their own companies, it would perhaps also move the price.
At the moment, crashes in Bitcoin can also be seen as a good thing because it helps give more people access to Bitcoin. It's even possible that some of the stakeholders (whales with thousands of BTC) occasionally deliberately induce crashes for exactly that purpose.
Disclosure - I made up the dog.
Point being that the scarcity argument of bitcoin is on its own not persuasive.
I used the cheeky example of dog poop because I though it was cute but I guess it was"too cute" and obscured the point.
Almost ironically, having a deflationary system is something one would really like to avoid if you thought about it. It only rewards hoarding. The king, with his hoard of gold, only grow's richer by the year. As long as he is cash flow positive, the supply upon which the peasants rely on to trade shrinks and therefore the value of each grain increases.
I, for one, don't think this system is one we should be rushing to return to.
No physical currency can be divided into 10 million pieces, no one has a crystal ball.
If one year an apple costs 2 gold coins, but next year, that same apple costs only 1 gold coin - this would be deflation. I'm still trading gold coin(s) for an apple (fungible), it's just that the currency itself got stronger against the asset I wanted to purchase.
The currency (or asset) will continue to outperform the dollar or any fiat currency because it is setup that way to scale inversely and inverted-like through the magic of fungibility.
No one no where ever created a means of trade accurate to the ten millionth. Go look it up I’ll wait.
Just because something scales inversely to your currency that doesn’t make it a ponzi, it makes it mathematically and theoretically possible; as the market itself has proven for nearly a decade.
If millennials invest in btc before boomer pensions get in, it’ll be a needed transfer of wealth.
If there’s a deflationary asset wave, each person is incentivized to get in early. Which I think is what is happening.
Although I think one huge hack or whale unloading could drop the trust in Bitcoin for years.
Incidentally, I hear that there are all these forks and clones of BTC, many of which have strictly limited supply. So, they are also valuable long term investments, I assume?