> “Whether it goes up or down in the next year, or five or 10 years, I don’t know. But the one thing I’m pretty sure of is that it doesn’t produce anything,” Buffett said. “It’s got a magic to it and people have attached magics to lots of things.”

Bitcoin has a lot of baggage, from energy consumption to the toxic community. But if you look at it on the protocol level, it is incredibly valuable. You can transfer and verify ownership of a finite amount of some numbers. It's a technology. How much is double entry book keeping worth? Now you can say the technology is already out, so obviously no one would pay to "buy" double entry book keeping because anyone could continue using it for free.

Similarly the Bitcoin technology can be repurposed and used in other tokens, and it has. But Bitcoin is unique in that it came along with a unique set of circumstances. For one, its original proceeds are fairly distributed (no pre-mine). It also helps that the creator is still miraculously anonymous. Other shitcoins, even Ethereum has a relatively concentrated ownership and centralized control. Bitcoin is also more battle tested and has a history the suggests the community would be immune to arbitrary changes (e.g. increasing number of tokens). Another coin could come along with a benevolent dictator, not hoard tokens for personal gain, take all Bitcoin's greatest ideas and add to them, create a community and trust over a decade or so, and overtake bitcoin as a de-facto leader in digital cash, but that's becoming increasingly less likely every year.