You may want to just accept the fact that Bitcoin is valuable because of what it offers as a store of value and system of trustless, censorship resistant exchange of value.
And everyone should also believe in God, because I say that God is real.
Bitcoin only has value because a bunch of nerds put a lot of real money into it and are convincing themselves and other suckers that it's actually got some sort of value, honest. At least other fiat has the backing of the economy and military of whatever nation backs it - at the end of the day, Bitcoin is a ticket you get stamped proving a bunch of electricity was wasted verifying the ticket with absolutely no backing if the whole thing goes tits up, and the fact that the prices are constantly in insane flux is all the proof needed to demonstrate that it's not a consistent store of value.
Miners actually have a lot less power than people realize. Anyone can run their own fully-validating Bitcoin node. Miners do indeed mine the blocks, but _all_ nodes perform verification. If miners try to mine invalid blocks, Bitcoin nodes will simply reject them.
What do you mean by "invalid"? My impression is that if you control 51% of the mining power and have at least some amount of control over the physical network path to your victim (e.g., ability to inject RST packets), you can execute double-spend attacks.
Are double-spend attacks not a concern?
If they are not a concern, why do we need so much computational capacity for mining?
it's not super valuable as an store of value of it's this volatile, right? the inherent value of the Bitcoin, especially now that transactions are slow and cost 50$, especially compared to other crypto currencies. This is just a clear speculation bubble
Bitcoin only has value because a bunch of nerds put a lot of real money into it and are convincing themselves and other suckers that it's actually got some sort of value, honest. At least other fiat has the backing of the economy and military of whatever nation backs it - at the end of the day, Bitcoin is a ticket you get stamped proving a bunch of electricity was wasted verifying the ticket with absolutely no backing if the whole thing goes tits up, and the fact that the prices are constantly in insane flux is all the proof needed to demonstrate that it's not a consistent store of value.