If my understanding is correct, then as soon as it becomes clear that there are better alternatives or Bticoin is unfit for this purpose, the price will drop.
Case in point: look at Gamestop stock, 15 months later. Still detached from reality, despite nobody -- even the buyers -- truly expecting the company to generate commensurate value.
My understanding is that besides some exceptions like Monero, most crypto is really bad for privacy.
Except to a well informed person with the proper tools, its difficult to follow even relatively basic transactions more than a few hops. How many of these kind of people do we think are employed by the IRS?
Even the FBI have been famously bad at tracking criminal funds, and they do have the expertise and tools.
I'm not saying BTC is a buy at 30k or whatever price, but when you're writing the exact same post people wrote 10 years ago against the thing when it was at 10 cents you kinda gotta question whether your logic is sound.
Yes, it's very volatile and no, just like gold, it doesn't protect you from inflation in the short run. but, it does protect from inflation in the long run. It doesn't have the adoption of gold yet, that's why there's more risk, but also more upside too.
Currencies have two properties: store of value and medium of exchange.
Gold has utility outside of store of value (you can make earrings or toilets out of it). Bitcoin does not.
Bitcoin has very limited uses as medium of exchange ("you can buy a pizza with it!"), I'm not aware anyone ever actually barters with gold anymore.
Both are speculative assets that store value, but have either lack medium of exchange or have limited use. Gold at least has some utility outside of these two properties.
That's it, there really is anything else to compare the two things by.
if we turn off the servers then this value store would disappear.
It's one of the main design principles of bitcoin, that it needs to be possible for someone to conceivably verify all transactions on a home setup. This ensures that we do not have to trust large operators to verify that the chain is following the protocol correctly.
It is one of the major problems with other coins, like ethereum, where this is not possible. This would leave it subject to pressure from political institutions in the future, which could force the reversal of transactions or freezing of accounts.