If I buy a lump of gold, and attempt to sell it to someone else later at a higher price, that is pure speculation. Gold is gold is gold. That lump of gold is going to be the same lump of gold a year from now or a hundred years from now. You might as well have buried the money in a backyard for all the change of affected in the world.
If I take that same money and invest it in a business -- the business is going to take that money and create something new. Hopefully what it creates will be worth more than what you invested, but in any case your investment has changed the world in some way.
I think a cryptocurrency is probably something in between that, because your 'investment' is actually ultimately going to miners who will expand the network, so you are actually building something new in a sense by investing in cryptocurrency. However I'm not sure that building the bitcoin network out is a net positive for the world.
> If I take that same money and invest it in a business -- the business is going to take that money and create something new.
Only if you're buying at the IPO. Most of the time, you're just buying stock from another person and the company gets zilch. The service you're providing to the company is just better information about its ability to raise additional capital from selling equity.
For some cryptocurrencies, you are providing a service to the miners by adding liquidity and pricing information, but given the volume trading on crypto exchanges, there is simply not enough currency being mined for even a tiny fraction of it to be going directly to miners as a counterparty. For a currency like Ripple, that is completely pre-mined, you don't even have that.
The company is also a shareholder and can pay out dividends or buy back stock to increase the price. One pays you directly, and the other increases your stake by diluting the pool of outstanding shares. Both are direct results of actions taken by the corporation, and both create something new: cash and equity, respectively.
I have trouble seeing what this has to do with my comment, which was specifically on the notion that investing money by buying a company's stock somehow helps the company, which is true only in the very narrow sense that I indicated.
Which would change nothing as gold is not an investment.
Also, if you 1 one bitcoin you can only sell less than 1 bitcoin from transaction fees. Remember, someone needs to spend real money maintain servers and that money is constantly being removed from the coin ecosystem.
Untrue. You can sell someone the private key to your wallet. That's free. If you're not going to classify commodities or real estate as investments, then sure, I guess bitcoin isn't an investment. But it's as much an investment as any commodity or real estate is.
real estate pays a dividend in the form of use of that land.
If I own a house I get to use the house today and still have a house tomorrow. With a field I could grow crops and then still have a field next year.
Commodities are an interesting 3rd thing. But, closer to buying something from a wholesaler than an investment as they represent actual goods (ie Oil) that will be sent somewhere. Think of it like this, if you buy coffee contract you get coffee which can be sold off. However it's a physical thing and it's got a physical expiration date, if you keep it in a pile somewhere for 10 years you end up with dirt.
Bitcoin provides a service though - a service that has demonstrable economic utility. Specifically: international value transfer. There are existing mechanisms for this (western union, swift) and they have costs. The sum of those costs is a reasonable way to think about Bitcoin's theoretical value by substitution, because it costs bitcoin to move bitcoin. And therefore if Bitcoin were to replace all other intl. value transfer mechanisms, the sum of those two sets of costs should be comparable.
https://i.imgur.com/AltAcnB.jpg
Keep in mind this graph is logarithmic in scale.