Comment by tchock23
14 hours ago
That assumes Bitcoin maximalists ultimately see it as a means of transaction. The ones I come across in the wild are purely maximalists for speculative purposes and couldn’t care less about the “practical” use cases for it.
Being able to transact is the point of it all. If practical use is not possible that makes it useless and that makes it worthless.
This has never been the main use outside an unrealistic dream world. Its main purposes are speculation and ponzi-like scams.
There are two components to price: what the thing is worth, and what you might be willing to convince someone else to buy it from you in the future for. The latter is the speculative component. The former must be related to some intrinsic property of the thing. For example, an orange has some minimum price, because if nothing else it's composed of matter and so can weight things down. If bitcoin is useless to transact, then its intrinsic worth is zero, so its price is 100% speculative. That's not so much a bubble as just air being pressurized by no container.
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Not saying anything new here, but at the core there are only a few key reasons for using bitcoin: investment, hiding your finances, and the idealism of de-centralization.
The intrinsic value of decentralization is the ability to operate outside any fiat system of laws or government. So that one lines up a lot with the criminal side of hiding your finances. The investment aspect sure is enticing to lots of folks, but without a real core underlying value it's just bubbles and rug-pulls. So all this has the effect, wittingly or not, of lining up the incentives of all BTC users with money launderers.
Sure there are TONS of perfectly legal reasons not to want people to track your finances. Many of them are even moral. But obviously many are neither moral nor legal. (The edge case of moral but illegal sure gets people fired up, but it's a vanishing minority of actual use.) So when the regulators come looking for criminals, we unsurprisingly get lots of sound and fury about how there are lots of perfectly valid reasons why good people will want to act in ways that make them look like criminals. Uh huh. Yes, there sure are.