[richk449]

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.

[grubles]

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.

[semiotagonal]

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.

[grubles]

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.

[rytill]

What about all those with no bitcoin?

I placed 20 $1 bills on the ground scattered right outside my house. They are out on the street, free and open air. Anyone can take them.

In actuality, there will be a small, small minority of the world that gets all the value.

[solotronics]

There are already thousands of Bitcoin clones with their own blockchains and they are basically worthless.

[ftufek]

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.

[nosuchthing]

Where is the demand?*

*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:

https://stripe.com/blog/ending-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):

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/12/steam-drops-bitcoin-p...

[solotronics]

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.

[eru]

Well, there's also value as jewelry. But that doesn't distract too much from the point.