Something being a desirable investment vehicle usually makes it an undesirable store of value: a store of value should be stable and predictable, not subject to significant changes in any direction.
> Which means easy to store, and highly resistant to manipulation and inflation.
These are, again, negative qualities in a store of value. A good store of value is inflates and deflates exactly as much as required to retain its backing value. Inflation means loss of value; deflation represents a liquidity risk when exiting the asset.
More generally, this is an indictment of the cryptocurrency community's basic financial literacy. You can't just call a speculative instrument a "store of value" because every who bought into it in the past two months has seen a positive return; that's just not what it is.
> Huge investment firms diversifying into crypto
> this is an indictment of the cryptocurrency community's basic financial literacy
I suggest that maybe it's you who lacks basic financial (and econ) literacy, not investment firms or the "cryptocurrency community"
> You can't just call a speculative instrument a "store of value" because every who bought into it in the past two months has seen a positive return
No, everyone who bought BTC at _any point in the past_ and didn't sell are seeing positive returns. This is the definition of a good store of value. You are conflating SoV properties with volatility. They are orthogonal. SoV is a long-term play.
No, it isn't. Apart from the fact that countless people have lost their shirts to BTC (it's down 6% today! There are losers today!), an asset whose value rises in unchecked proportion to the real economy represents a fundamental liquidity risk: everybody is going to want to sell, but nobody is going to want to buy.
That is why cash is the canonical store of value: not only does it not change (much), but you can exchange it without undermining the value itself.
BTC's liquidity has been increasing and will continue to increase in the future, so it's just a matter of time.
And you are again conflating SoV with volatility. Todays cash (USD) is not volatile but it's a terrible SoV. That's why no one is storing their wealth in USD and flee to harder assets (stocks, bonds, gold, and BTC).
Highly recommend this video for how investment firms think about BTC and SoV and how you should too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlXqfibqb38
Sure, if you want to trust an exchange. But try setting up and running Bitcoin Armory and see how 'easy' that is
> exactly because it is a good store of value
I wouldn't consider highly volatile currencies a "good store of value".
> and highly resistant to manipulation and inflation.
Far from it. An exchange goes tits-up and BTC plummets, and then everyone else follows. It's super susceptible to coordinated pump and dump schemes. Holding any crypto can get you red-flagged by the IRS, and if you don't admit to it most legit exchanges will rat you out. (Better for non-Americans, I guess...)
One of my favorite things to do every now and then is pull up CMC and see just how many coins' performance is a fraction of BTC's. Its funny because at BTC's most volatile times nearly the entire chart is red or green.
Personal pet peeve -- "a lot" is not synonymous with "exponentially." Crypto's market cap is decidedly sublinear on a logarithmic chart.
> exactly because it is a good store of value
If I pre-mine a trillion units of a cryptocurrency and sell one to my dog for $1 then it has a trillion dollar market cap. Whether or not it's a good store of value is a separate claim which needs independent proof.
> easy to store
So long as you never make any mistakes. Mt. Gox did a decent job at storing crypto for awhile ;)
> highly resistant to manipulation
So long as we pretend that Elon's tweets didn't impact dogecoin by >50% and that more broadly a form of word-of-mouth popularity doesn't affect the general public's chance of investing in crypto.