Nonsense. They have no use, not even as a status symbol or as a practical unit of exchange. The “real value of a bitcoin” is zero, and the fact that this isn’t obvious to everyone is, frankly, astonishing.
[1] Please enlighten me if you know more ways of determining the value of assets.
However, it's not in the interest of users of BTC to use a wildly unstable currency. My prediction is that bitcoin will be replaced at some point by another crypto currency which fixes some of its major flaws - particularly its deflationary nature.
As far as I can tell, there's no real reason it has to stay deflationary.
At some point there could be a consensus that inflation would be good for bitcoin and they could patch the client to start increasing the new bitcoins per block.
tbh I don't know why it isn't inflationary, if it was you could remove/reduce transaction fees as miners would always have an incentive
In theory there could.
In practice, the vast majority of the bitcoin users are speculators, and will fight tooth-and-nail against changing away from being deflationary.
If the miners think that they'll get more value out of the system by creating new coins forever, they'll make the change. They have to be careful not to destroy confidence in the system; this will be part of their value assessment.
Which IMHO is what will kill it; it's just a terrible feature for a currency.
That bitcoins are divisible completely misses the point that prices go up faster than they go down, i.e. they are sticky, and deflation is painful and feeds back into itself leading to a recession. Divisibility is not the correct solution, inflation is the correction solution, i.e. add more money rather than expect all prices to go down to adjust to the supply of a fixed currency.
Sometimes it is more valuable to accept what you do not know instead of pretending. Bitcoin may drop to $0 or bounce back to $250. I do not know, but I know why it made it this far and that is something that I would suggest you attempt to grasp before making any broad, unsubstantiated statements.
"I have better things to do with my time than play with weird monopoly money"
And say "I like the cut of this guy's jib", for similar reasons, but I guess now I have...
I won't further comment on BTC since both sides are staunchly rooted in their positions.
Show me your inherent-value-meter, or shut up. Simple, eh?
That's dodging the question. And in a rather clumsy way. The "use value" of things depends heavily on epoch, person, even fashion and weather. So what is exactly "real" in real value?
> the present value of future cash flows
You don't say! Sorry but a) future cash flows is an estimation at best b) the present value of future cash flows depends heavily on the circumstances of the valuator.
On whether you have a debt to a mobster to pay, or an angry girlfriend to placate..