I neglected to explain it in my original post but bitcoin has all of the good properties of gold and none of the bad - primarily in terms of how easy it is to settle (especially over long distances) and the guaranteed fixed supply and emission rate.
Gold has real industrial and consumer uses (and therefore reliable demand). I don't see why anyone buys Bitcoin for any reason other than that another speculator will pay him more for it later.
Why does it have to be more? As long as someone else pays him roughly the same amount for Bitcoin in the future, it’ll have worked as a store of value.
Do you really think the people buying gold are buying it so that they can sell it to industry, as opposed to buying it so that they could potentially sell it to someone else who does the same thing? If gold price were based on industrial uses alone it’d be worth a small fraction of what it’s worth now. Is gold a Ponzi scheme?