This seems to be almost purely bandwagon value, like preferring Coca-Cola to some other drink. There are other blockchains that are better technically along a bunch of dimensions, but they don't have the mindshare.

Bitcoin is probably unkillable. Even if were to crash, it won't be hard to round up enough true believers to boost it up again. But it's technically stagnant.

There can be a bunch of crazy people trading each other various lumps of dog feces for increasing sums of cash, that doesn't mean dogshit is particularly valuable or substantive either.

Beanie Babies were trading pretty well, too, although it wasn't quite "solving sudokus for drugs", so I guess that's why they didn't have as much staying power.

very little of the trading actually happens on the blockchain, it's only used to move assets between trading venues.

The values of bitcoin are:

- easy access to trading for everyone, without institutional or national barriers

- high leverage to effectively easily borrow a lot of money to trade with

- new derivative products that streamline the process and make speculation easier than ever

The blockchain plays very little part in this. If anything it makes borrowing harder.

If you can't point to real use cases at scale, it's hard to argue it has intrisinc value even though it may have speculative value.

With almost zero fundamentals. That’s the part you are glossing over.

Uh… So the argument here is that anticipated future value == meaningful value today?

The whole cryptocurrency world requires evangelical buy-in. But there is no directly created functional value other than a historic record of transactions and hypothetical decentralization. It doesn’t directly create value. It’s a store of it - again, assuming enough people continue to buy into the narrative so that it doesn’t dramatically deflate when you need to recover your assets. States and other investors are helping make stability happen to maintain it as a value store, but you require the story propagating to achieve those ends.

You’re wasting your breath. Bitcoin will be at a million in 2050 and you’ll still get downvoted here for suggesting it’s anything other than a stupid bubble that’s about to burst any day now.