You could say its inherent value is its anonymous nature and potential for replacing traditional banking.
Yeah, no, and no on that. But you keep finding someone that tells you the future of its market evaluation.
On the first part, transaction flows are public, and accounts can be forced to be checked by governments at the point of exchange. Basically - the thing gets monitored, and once there is too much activity that -
a. isnt taxed or
b. arent mostly transaction flows from forreign countries into the US
you start to talk to exchanges.
On the second part Bitcoin is unfit to replace what you'd call 'traditional banking'. It simply cant handle the transaction volume needed by a factor. And it will never be able to. (You only have a certain amount of wiggle room you can change the protocol at a time, you need adoption from other miners, mostly in mindshare - if you do something that isnt perceived to benefit everyone, you get reputation damage, infighting, ... so its hard to say - we remove proof of work, for example. Its easier to pronounce bitcoin 'the new gold' which serves all its current properties. Limited transaction flows, manipulated by bigger entities, buying and selling quantities coordinatedly, the average guy that holds it, holds it for a long time. All of that is 'sticking to the scheme' (hodlhodlho), and finding new people to buy into it.) With every move to 'make it more legit in appearance' (now paypal is acting as an exchange! (An exchange makes money from exchange fees - in case you didnt know.)) you get more people interested. Thats about all.
There is a certain value in driving it, because its the market leader, so people actually make shortcuts like 'are cryptocurrencies the future?' how well is bitcoin doing? So if you are in the market of popularizing virtual currencies, or simply a company looking for new talent thats looking for opportunity and is motivated, it pays to invest in its exchange value, and the scene around it.
What we've seen previously is high volatility (thats pump and dump, thats price manipulation), and the new thing now is the promise of price stability because 'bigger entities are now entering the market' so everyone is more interested in structural stability (to sell it to more people) than in value spikes. Value spikes are 'speculation driven', a more stable value over time would lend itself to value storage. (Especially if its 'easy' for the small guy to engage in tax fraud that way. Or its perceived that way. To not say that outright, you show high amounts of empathy with people in countries with high exchange rate fluctuations - and tell everyone you are doing them a service. This works, as long as the US FED is interested in having it work.) Why should everyone buy BC to try to 'conserve value' in foreign economies? The answer given there is 'high opportunity', 'easy', and 'its reputation' (the thing you mentioned as it being, despite it being none of that).
All of that has value - very much the same way a ponzi scheme has value. As in - there are very obvious limitations, it is very hard to circumvent them, People are changing what the thing 'is' in your mind as we speak (no, no - its meant as value storage, dont yous see?), new entities are entering, because its big enough to make money with it - if you are an established exchange, or if you want to speculate.
More people entering means its value is rising.
The more its value rises, the more interesting it becomes to look at 'distribution of stake' and even that isnt ideal with BC (see the working pump and dump schemes in the past (people producing trends coordinatedly to buy low, and sell high)) - because lets say you are interested in the stability of that specific blockchain, because you love the idea of using its infrastructure of 'distributed verification' for something like smart contracts.
For that you'd also need it to be (somewhat) stable at a high evaluation.
BUT - there is almost no reason to. Everyone is just using centralized databases and doing fine (better even..
).
There is part of it that might be necessary for future economies, basically think of an internet of things interacting with each other without having to resort to centralization, or a service economy, where every one is selling their micro services to the next person, some of that automated, some of that conditional (smart contracts for everyday people)... There something like a blockchain has value. (So 'more than conventional banking'.)
Bitcoin, for that is horrible as well, but it has legacy rights I guess. (Mindshare, people perceive it as the thing they've heard of).
And the new cool is everyone telling everyone, that tulip bulbs are so high value, they ought to look into that market - no one quite seems to have a reason, but hey - they are rising in value!
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Part of the 'look what its worth now'! hype comes from the fact, that people still perceive it as something 'they could create out of thin air themselves' so should they do it? Should they ask a nerd friend, how to do it? Should they print money? And the answer to that is, if they dont have free excess electricity, that they cant get a higher price for - selling it as electricity, I guess, they could buy asics and graphics cards and bank on the trend. For everyone else - its a speculation object.
And hardly anything more.
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edit: Lets ask nobel laureates:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency_bubble
The problem with real money is that when any government needs money it prints more money. Whereas Gold and Bitcoins theres only a finite number on earth.
So money when printed it becomes more and more worthless and bitcoins more worth it
Could I interest you in some limited run toy figurines as an investment asset?