| Bitcoin’s market cap has three main components: - speculation, as you say (sells outside a window) - savings (sells after a period of time) - float to cover transactions (sells continuously but also buys continuously, netting out to a stable holding) They are all somewhat interrelated... speculation decreases savings value if it has volatility on a timescale bigger than typical vests. Float is constituted in part by the other two, although much of its cap is pure in/our money transfers. Speculators get most of their value from other speculators, but also react to changes in the float and savings market. And any individual transaction will usually be some combination of the three. A saver might also be hoping for some return on top of the storage value. Someone who is moving money overseas might leave it in BTC for some additional time if they don’t have a better place to store that money. Still, the mix of those motivations will lead to very different trading profiles. And only a small portion of those decisions are deterministic on the spot price of BTC, which is why calling them “100% speculative” is wrong. |