I don't think bitcoin provides much value in itself. Its basically an asset that is hard to make more of, like money or gold, which are also valuable because of this and that gold and specific currencies are relatively widely used.

bitcoin's supposed added value over money is private digital transactions across the globe in a private way, so that you can send money whoever you want, but it's not practically private, and has so large operating costs (even just the transaction fee) that it's not really better than bank transactions.

so in short: its value is in its scarcity, and that you can speculate on it. the other possible advantages are not realized.

since the value is in speculation, the dollar limit is when investors start selling enough of it so that others will do the same out of fear. which is who knows how much. but it's probably more related to other factors than the dollar value.

From a basic labor theory of value perspective, bitcoin requires labor to produce because mining it requires massive amounts of compute power. This computer power is supplied using GPUs and electricity, both of which require labor to produce.

If you use this calculator, and enter the values 67 TH/s (tera hashes per second, the rate at which you are mining), 2680 watts for electricity consumption rate, and 5 cents per kilo watt hour as prices, you will see

4.25 USD revenue per day 3.22 USD cost per day Profit rate = 32.0%

To make the values of the the hash rate and energy consumption rate realistic, I consulted the specs of the machine antminer S17, which is aparantly a machine used in the bitcoin mining world (I ain't into crypto mining). The cost of electricty comes from Kazakhstan, which has cheap electricty and substantial mining operations.

So basically, at the current price of bitcoin can support a gross profit rate of 32% for the people who produce bitcoin, assuming you keep all the profit (no taxes, interest, rent), have no employees or maintainable costs. This is the price currently settled at based on the technological conditions and level of competition.

It is nothing too crazy of a price, and the rapid growth of price in bitcoin is due to how the currency was designed. Basically, once a certain number of bitcoin have been mined, the bitcoin generation rate per mined block halves. This forces an exponential rise in the difficulty of mining bitcoin, and therefore an exponential rise in its price.

Most probably, if bitcoin was designed to have a constant difficulty of producing, its price wouldn't have increased at all.

When it was first released, I was interested in the decentralized nature of it as a currency. I liked - well, I still like - the idea of a currency that isn't controlled by a government. At the time (2009-ish?), I also thought it was anonymous, which also appealed to me; cash is mostly anonymous, but it can't be used online, and even then the fact that society was increasingly moving toward cashless - and very traceable, and usary-heavy - credit cards was clear. Stripping privacy is critical to control.

Bitcoin isn't anonymous, but other cryptocurrencies are, and bitcoin laid the groundwork. To your question, I, and many other people, paid some money to get some bitcoin - I think I spent $120? Mainly so I had enough to explore the space and play with it, because even then mining seemed painfully slow. Once money was spent on it, by whomever and for whatever reason, it acquired value: the value that, if you had some, you could sell it to someone else, or trade it for goods. In that way, it has the same value as an IOU on which I've scribbled "Good for $10 from Ruairidh Featherstonehaugh" and signed my name. Flawed metaphor, but you get there idea - the paper itself has no intrinsic value.

Despite that mining is so horrible for the environment, the concept that motivated Bitcoin still IMHO has value. An entirely digital, cashless system, not controlled by any one organization but rather by the community of participants. If Bitcoin didn't have the environmental cost - if it has been proof-of-stake rather than proof-of-work, or if the computational work was actually something useful to society like gridcoin.us, it wouldn't be so controversial. Sure, people are still going to be bitter about not buying into it early, but as long as people are willing to trade goods and services for it, it'll have real value based on market rates.

What is a first edition holographic charizard worth? What is the utility of that card?

Things are worth what people are willing to pay for them.

You can't eat a Bitcoin for sustainance. Or hammer a nail with it. You can't do either of those things with a pokemon card either.

I feel like you get this, based on your post... But you still are hung up by it.

Bitcoin's attractive utility for many is that you can transfer them pretty much unimpeded by any external entity. Like a government for example.

Like, hypothetically, what if you wanted to send a million dollars to your family back in, I dunno, Hong Kong. Do you think you can put that in a suitcase and hop on a plane? Do you think your bank will just send that wire? No. Government needs to know about it.

You can send a million dollars worth of Bitcoin, though. No problem.

What about if the government decides to seize your assets, for whatever reason? Maybe you were a little too loud about your support of Palestine and a man child president decided to make an example of you? They can raid your home. They can seize your bank accounts. Can they get your Bitcoin? Nope (if you're actually holding it yourself)

What sets Bitcoin apart from other currencies is that it's very government resistant. You CAN hold it yourself. Not digitally in a bank. Not as bills under your mattress. It cant be seized.

How much SHOULD Bitcoin be worth, given the utility it provides? No idea. But it's something.

Crypto is as valuable as you want it to be because it is not real. Not being real is a big problem for a currency.

Bitcoin is a ponzi scheme with a really long time horizon. In a way, any fiat currency kinda is as well. The difference is that a government backed fiat currency like the US Dollar is backed by the US Government saying "you will accept the USD, or else". That backing keeps the game running. Bitcoin has nothing like that. The only reason it keeps going is because of speculation, money laundering and the purchase of black market goods.

So, as long as you can go buy drugs or move money across borders with Bitcoin, it will have value. As long as it has value, some folks will speculate on it. That can keep prices up, right up until it doesn't. So, as is always the case for speculative assets, caveat emptor.

In this world anything can have value as long as there are other stupid ppl who'd believe you. Any form of money is just a piece of paper. Gold, silver and all those are just rocks. Even food once was cherished as the ultimate wealth but now we waste food by Metric F*ck tonnes.

No one on this earth or beyond can predict what will be the value of anything. If someone says this is going to make you a millions they are either trying to sell you their course/books/etc. Or they think you are the next idiot to whom they can sell garbage.

Money is an IOU. Bitcoin is an IOU but the ledger is decentralized rather than in control of banks.

Once you start seeing the value of any currency as one of itself rather than trying to express it in a different value system, a Bitcoin needs nothing but its inherent worth as payment.

That said, because we all still use traditional forms of currency, a Bitcoin is now worth, say, 112000 breads. It's worth two new mid-sized cars.

Value is based on scarcity and demand. If something is hard to come by, like bitcoin currently is, the price is hardly affected. But if demand is higher than the supply, prices skyrocket. Demand dies down the moment people feel like crypto is a scam. Supply will stop since Bitcoin has a physical limit (of the top of my head 21 billion). It is no longer realistic to start mining the stuff and receiving it for payment is just silly at this point.

But to flip it around, what is the value of a US dollar, without expressing it in terms of another currency? It used to be tied to gold. You can't really state one dollar is equal to, say, one bread. The price of bread has fluctuated. Or, has the value of a dollar fluctuated and has a bread always been worth one pair of socks?

Baseline: everything is worth one of itself and trying to express it in another value system is just a snapshot, a moment in time which will have changed soon after.

Besides gambling hype I think regular people are into it for a couple reasons:

-don’t have to trust the whims of your state government (who could devalue their currency at any time)

-deflationary by design so your earnings maintain value (no one could discover a btc meteor to mine)

-Requires broad miner consensus to change the rules

Paper money isn't worth anything innately. Gold isn't either. Not diamonds. Nothing has innate worth except food, air, drinking water, and possibly shelter.

It's value is in remittance if nothing else. It's cheaper than western union. But the network is only "cheaper" in that way because it has distributed the costs of running the network to the speculating miners who solve pointless puzzles with monsterously greedy processing farms hoping to win the lottery and get back more than they put in. It's a ponzi scheme, it takes more from everyone who came later and gives the value to early adopters who were there when you could solo mine coins with whatever hardware and a bitcoin was worth 7 dollars in exchange. Look up how many coins Satoshi is supposedly holding. If they were to cash out even a small fraction the whole market would crash. So use it as a remittance service but not an asset if you must. This from someone who mined 27k worth of it back when it was 7$ and spent it all on illicit medical cannabis before it inflated to 50k

The way i see it, bitcoin is just a glorified savings fund.

The only value, as in labour put in, would be the energy spent by the hashing process but honestly considering it value its as if we considered value a person endlessly working digging a hole and then filling it back up, sure it's energy spent but its spent in a non productive way.