How is that valuable, aside from ones ability to speculate on how much people will want it in the future?
As an aside, I agree with the other poster that there is no intrinsic scarcity to bitcoin, because anyone can create bitcoinN which are nearly identical to bitcoin. I say nearly because you can’t necessarily replicate the network, so the scarcity really depends on complicated emergent human behavior.
Your "nearly" identical is why they are completely different. Only bitcoins are valid on the Bitcoin network. Any clonecoin's token will be rejected since nodes on the Bitcoin network validate transactions and blocks that are mined.
Take any of the past 2 years' forks of Bitcoin (e.g. Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, Super Bitcoin, etc.) and try to submit a transaction to the actual legitimate Bitcoin network. It will fail.
One of Bitcoin's main technological achievements is solving this type of digital duplication problem. If anyone can just copy-and-paste new bitcoins into the system, it will fail.
You wouldn't try to submit it to the "actual legitimate Bitcoin network" though. You'd bootstrap a whole new network instead. People might prefer a new blockchain that starts with a more even distribution, instead of enriching early adopters of BTC.
That said, blockchain may not work at all, as applied to digital currencies. The abilities to revoke and expropriate are tools, like prisons are. Their use, on occasion, is just. Society might not want to see those tools discarded.
Your whole new network wouldn't be Bitcoin then. Therefore there is no cloning. Bitcoin scarcity remains in tact.
Bitcoin's initial distribution was as preferable as it can really get. It was announced to a mailing list of people most likely to pay attention to it. Anyone with a computer could join the network and be rewarded with bitcoins. You didn't even need to have a fast computer. The software was free and open source. There isn't much you can improve upon without introducing trust or maligned identification schemes.
Of course you need to have demand for scarcity to be valuable. And I would argue that in the 10 years of it's existence so far, Bitcoin has proven that there is demand for it.
Of course, you can create an identical coin on paper. Many have tried and their attempts have failed because like you said, the human behavior (aka the social aspect, network effects, psychology, etc) also have a big effect.
In my opinion and feel free to disagree, I think Bitcoin has the true potential of being the internet's native currency, especially with many lightning network wallets coming online on the mainnet. It's far from being perfect and unfortunately has attracted many scammers and want-to-get-rich-quick-people over the last few years, but I believe it has a really great potential.
*If you read the article, it explains the demand was from the person behind Bitfinex printing a seemingly unlimited amount of Tether to steal BTC from other exchanges, so the demand is in effect a huge heist across all exchanges that supported Tether / USDT.
In Bitcoin's ideal use case, internet transactions - nearly all businesses have rejected BTC as a form of payment.
Stripe, the famous silicon valley payment processor discontinued Bitcoin support:
"At Stripe, we’ve long been excited about the possibilities of cryptocurrencies and the experimentation and innovation that’s come with them. In 2014, we became the first major payments company to support Bitcoin payments.
Our hope was that Bitcoin could become a universal, decentralized substrate for online transactions and help our customers enable buyers in places that had less credit card penetration or use cases where credit card fees were prohibitive.
Over the past year or two, as block size limits have been reached, Bitcoin has evolved to become better-suited to being an asset than being a means of exchange. Given the overall success that the Bitcoin community has achieved, it’s hard to quibble with the decisions that have been made along the way. (And we’re certainly happy to see any novel, ambitious project do so well.)
This has led to Bitcoin becoming less useful for payments, however. Transaction confirmation times have risen substantially; this, in turn, has led to an increase in the failure rate of transactions denominated in fiat currencies. (By the time the transaction is confirmed, fluctuations in Bitcoin price mean that it’s for the “wrong” amount.) Furthermore, fees have risen a great deal. For a regular Bitcoin transaction, a fee of tens of U.S. dollars is common, making Bitcoin transactions about as expensive as bank wires.
Because of this, we’ve seen the desire from our customers to accept Bitcoin decrease. And of the businesses that are accepting Bitcoin on Stripe, we’ve seen their revenues from Bitcoin decline substantially. Empirically, there are fewer and fewer use cases for which accepting or paying with Bitcoin makes sense.
Therefore, starting today, we are winding down support for Bitcoin payments. Over the next three months we will work with affected Stripe users to ensure a smooth transition before we stop processing Bitcoin transactions on April 23, 2018.
Despite this, we remain very optimistic about cryptocurrencies overall. There are a lot of efforts that we view as promising and that we can certainly imagine enabling support for in the future. We’re interested in what’s happening with Lightning and other proposals to enable faster payments. OmiseGO is an ambitious and clever proposal; more broadly, Ethereum continues to spawn many high-potential projects. We may add support for Stellar (to which we provided seed funding) if substantive use continues to grow. It’s possible that Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, or another Bitcoin variant, will find a way to achieve significant popularity while keeping settlement times and transaction fees very low. Bitcoin itself may become viable for payments again in the future. And, of course, there’ll be more ideas and technologies in the years ahead.
So, we will continue to pay close attention to the ecosystem and to look for opportunities to help our customers by adding support for cryptocurrencies and new distributed protocols in the future."
Case study in Bitcoin as a payment system where even highly technically proficient users were unable to reliably use BTC to buy digital goods (Steam games):
The same way gold is valuable. The industrial value of gold is near silver and therefore without speculation and its use as a store of value it would be worth closer to $100 instead of $1500.
Your clone of Bitcoin wouldn't be a 'clone' any more than a lead bar is a 'clone' of gold.
You might call it bitcoin all you want, but no actualy bitcoin software would be fooled. (You might trick some people, but fraud has existed long before computers).
It's a lot less expensive to reliably distinguish a fraudulent bitcoin from a fraudulent goal bar.
So even if you hold the position that there is no perfect scarcity because fraud is possible-- the cost, difficulty, and success rate of that fraud matters greatly.
My clone of bitcoin would have exactly the same properties as bitcoin. Your lead bar doesn't have any of the useful properties of gold (ductability, beauty, conductivity, etc).
For most applications (including Gold's most popular-by-value applications, -- jewelry and sitting in vaults) you can substitute it with other materials with equivalent (or better!) physical properties.
If you want an element that acts like gold (doesn’t oxidize, high electrical conductivity, high thermal conductivity, malleable, etc.), you need gold. You can’t replace it with lead and get the same results.
If you want a string of bits that acts like bitcoin, you can replace it with Xcoin, for many values of X. You can even create your own coin which does whatever you need. You may not be able to replicate the network, which may provide some amount of scarcity, but it’s not the same as gold.
If you and 1 other person use the cloned Bitcoin, that's a network. How many other participants do you need before new Bitcoin is comparable in every tangible way to old Bitcoin?
Tell me, how do replicate the network effects of current miners? You know, the thing that prevents someone with decent mining power in their garage to take over your clone? (or do a doublespend, or whatever) The network effect is security. Which come from the expenditure. Which is sustainable with the rising price. Which was baked in through the declining emission curve. Beautifully well thought, and well executed.
I too was doubtful about bitcoin at first. It's just plain obvious now: first mover advantage, leading to the development of highly specific ASICs, with a side advantage of allowing the cross border trade of electricity when turned it into mining power. So if you live in some isolated place but with cheap energy, money!!
BTC is too big to fail. A success that can't be replicated or taken down as it was ignored for too long. Even more unimaginable now that it benefits some people who wouldn't let them happen without a fight, and who have the power and the money to give this fight.
Which will be promptly rejected as invalid since the nodes on the Bitcoin network validate everything. This is partially why (among other reasons) Bitcoin is transformative tech. It can resist quite easily individuals trying to forcefully change aspects of it, like say, cloning the entire supply of bitcoin.
As an aside, I agree with the other poster that there is no intrinsic scarcity to bitcoin, because anyone can create bitcoinN which are nearly identical to bitcoin. I say nearly because you can’t necessarily replicate the network, so the scarcity really depends on complicated emergent human behavior.