Please omit flamebait from your comments here. Nothing good can come of it! Even if other commenters are annoying, we all need to learn the discipline not to react to annoyance—and especially not to pre-react to pre-annoyance.
It seems to me to be a way to say “put your money there and it will eventually become more”, which is just speculation, and not a store of anything.
Edit: to add to that, how is Bitcoin a store of value if a bear market is >90% lower than a bull market?
That seems to be a meme that people repeat to justify their Bitcoin bet, but I don’t see how that makes sense.
On the other hand, if you decide to store your savings in the form of Dollar bills under your pillow, you’re probably not speculating its purchasing power to increase (as that would be against its historic trend). Rather, you’re speculating to need it soon to buy goods. Essentially, you’re betting on an economic crisis to come soon and prepare yourself with a decent amount of cash.
Either way you are trying to anticipate the future and, hence, engage in “speculation”.
IMHO, the “store of value” vs “speculation” is a false dichotomy.
Consider instead, that a bitcoin (or satoshi) could be a frame of reference, and from it, you can determine whether a dollar is dropping. Here's a visualization of this: https://usdsat.com.
Since it is very clear from this visualization that over the course of years (rather than hours, which you have limited yourself to) that the dollar is in decline w.r.t bitcoin, then anybody wishing to "store value" over the course of years (not hours) would be making a poor choice if they selected dollars to do it.
This is part speculation, as you suggest, but this speculation is not random or guesswork - it is a result of other processes which go by names such as "quantitative easing." These processes (deliberately) devalue the dollar. Since not everybody wants to hold onto an asset which is being devalued, they look for alternatives, and they find one which, by design, cannot be deliberately devalued.
Further, the reason the value of dollars declines so rapidly w.r.t bitcoin is because people are betting against the currency which is being devalued, and for the one which can't be deliberately devalued. As more people make this bet, others become more confident that they can also make the same bet, which then leads to a situation where the more astute savers will front-run other savers because they expect that the dollar will continue to decline in value w.r.t bitcoin - and since the monetary policy of the federal reserve is to keep devaluing the dollar this is a very asymmetric bet.
> You have arbitrarily chosen a frame of reference which fits your existing world-view
It’s not really arbitrary. The earth and things anchored directly to it is an obvious frame of reference for objects moving in space because it is by far the largest gravity well compared to anything you’d be referencing it against.
The US dollar is the world’s reserve currency, and fiat currencies have armies and police backing them and their use for paying taxes in addition to massive distribution, velocity, and proven utility.
But beside that, I can buy things with it, and I regularly do buy things with it. I pay people with it, and get paid with it. So that makes it money to me. Peoples experience with it make it something else to them. ether is more useful to me than $ (as a european).
This perspective is blunt, but correct. Crypto is successful primarily by virtue of its unregulated rube goldberg casino revenue model, with just enough of a plausible tech veneer to allow people to rationalize behavior otherwise indistinguishable from naked gambling.
Crypto does not solve the centralization of leverage over liquidity (and thus the ability of a few to manipulate the wealth of many), which is the sole centralization "problem" that matters to the vast majority of people who would use it.
Take away the Potemkin decentralization apparatus known as a blockchain (the premise of which holds that The State and its central bank minions are the only centralizing agents capable of public harm) and you are left with plain old unsexy digital currency.
It also certainly defeats much of the original purpose of decentralization when a few stakeholders have total control of the network because they hold the most coins...
Regardless if the network has "correct incentives" or not, things can happen to those stakeholders outside their control, or other incentives could easily develop to act in bad faith against the network.
As opposed to a few stakeholders that have total control of the network because they hold the most computational power?
And before you bring up mining pools, you can replicate that in Proof of Stake by creating staking pools.
Lol. And we're just supposed to believe you, right? Show me one POS which is as secure as POW.