[paxys]

The explanation I have seen works best for a non-technical audience is – Bitcoin is digital gold, and there is a global ledger which automatically tracks who owns how much of it.

There is a finite amount of it out there, and it has to be "mined".

There is nothing that makes it different from any other "coin" or really any other combination of bits (just like gold isn't unique among all the elements in any way), but it is simply what most people decided would be the one.

No country or central government decides how much Bitcoin is worth. It is all up to people trading on many individual exchanges. Or you can buy/sell it directly without using an exchange, all same as gold.

Is Bitcoin (or will Bitcoin ever be) a currency? This one is complicated, and goes into subjective discussions about what currency even means.

[fny]

> No country or central government decides how much gold is worth

This is true today. It was not true in the US 50 years ago. It does not need to be true tomorrow.

The government can put ceilings and floors in the price of all things just as easily as Turkey banned crypto.

[chii]

> The government can put ceilings and floors in the price of all things

and see how Venezuela fared when they tried to control their official currency exchange to the USD.

[skohan]

The thing about this argument is, bitcoin used to be a lot more like money. In 2015 there were several Bitcoin ATMs in my city, and a handful of shops where I could pay directly from my wallet to buy a cup of coffee or computer parts.

> No country or central government decides how much Bitcoin is worth. It is all up to people trading on many individual exchanges. You can also buy/sell it directly without using an exchange, all same as gold.

It's a nice ambition, but is bitcoin really decentralized? The thing which made BTC less useful as a currency between 2015 and 2017 for example was that the core team refused to increase the block size, meaning transactions got much much slower and more expensive.

To compare BTC to gold, our best physical manifestation of "intrinsic value" seems a bit off the mark for something which is vulnerable to being rendered useless if a hand-full of unaccountable individuals decide to make it so.