Bitcoin Forum

After last week's price crash, I saw some discussions regarding this topic. I have not changed my thesis. I wrote a post to explain my view.

Original Post: https://bitflate.org/post/2020/03/17/bitcoin-is-a-store-of-value.html

This article expresses a personal opinion of the Bitflate developer. It is not investment advice.

TL;DR

Long-term, Bitcoin is a Store of Value.

Short-term, Bitcoin is a speculative asset.

The coronavirus is spreading across the world. The US economy is feeling its impact. In time of crisis, people are dumping equities for cash. Crypto market had a hard crash last week. Bitcoin dropped more than 50% on March 12, 2020. Bitcoin analyst, Nic Carter, pointed out that it was the 2nd worst percentage drop in recorded history of Bitcoin trading. The worst percentage drop happened in 2013. This Bitcoin’s price drop coincides with the US stock market crash. This correlated price movement challenges Bitcoin’s value proposition as a safe haven Store of Value.

The magnitude of price drop shattered many bitcoin owners. They’re quick to dump and start to question the safe haven SoV thesis. This is understandable. As we are introduced to Bitcoin, the first most enduring thesis we hear is the Store of Value. The stock market drops 5-10% a day during this crisis, while the Bitcoin Store of Value drop 50% in a day. Bitcoin is peculiar. It lives in the fringe and extremities of our psychology. Can a Store of Value be extremely volatile? I think the answer is yes. We consider how we view Bitcoin in the short-term or long-term.

Bitcoin’s short-term price movements are dependent on traders

Bitcoin is a global digital currency. People trade it 24/7. There is no circuit break. No authority can intervene to stop its price movements. If we divide Bitcoin owners into hodlers and traders, we can see that traders dominate Bitcoin’s daily movements. Occasionally, hodlers will switch to be traders and vice versa. When Bitcoin price crashes, some hodlers may become anxious and start dumping their bitcoins.

Traders want to make money. They think short-term. They live off price movements. Bitcoin’s short-term price trend is speculative. It’s difficult to understand its daily price actions. With the stock market index, when many stocks can crash, some stocks remain well positioned. For example, this crisis greatly impacts Boeing due to decrease in air travel. But Costco benefits from increase volume. Bitcoin is a solo asset. Therefore, its price movement is very volatile.

Bitcoin’s fundamentals remain strong

During this price crash, we saw Bitcoin’s price dropped below $4k. But it bounced back and has hold above $5k in the past few days. This likely indicates that long-term investors remain holding and buying.

We see how Bitcoin price can make sudden and drastic changes. This recent price crash is entirely caused by external factors. Bitcoin’s fundamentals change very little. Besides a hashrate drop, we don’t see any other change in how Bitcoin trades and operates. It is still producing blocks every 10 minutes, or maybe a little slower. It is still issuing 12.5 coins for every block for the past 4 years. It is still secure. Bitcoin’s fundamentals remain strong.

Bitcoin is a Store of Value

If we zoom out the hours, days, and months of the Bitcoin price chart, we can see its long-term price trend remains up. The currently crisis is caused by external factors. The coronavirus is impacting the world’s economies. A sudden panic is causing people to flee asset markets. This has not changed Bitcoin’s value thesis. Long-term, Bitcoin is a Store of Value.

By long-term, I mean the time horizon is 5-10 years (more than 1 halving). Bitcoin’s price movement is affected by traders in the short-term. But in the long-term, hodlers will ultimately decide its price trend.

Long-term, Bitcoin is a Store of Value.

Short-term, Bitcoin is a speculative asset.

When to dump Bitcoin

People will move their money around. I follow but usually ignore short-term price movements. I try to stick with my timeline and how I allocate money. During tumultuous times, some bitcoiners advocate HODLism as a strategy. You should always hold. But I don’t think this is a sound strategy. I think a sound investment approach is to compare Bitcoin with other assets. If I see Bitcoin overvalued compared to real estate or equities, I would consider dumping Bitcoin. This is my personal view of how to deal with Bitcoin’s price movements. You should do your own research.

Bitflate is a cryptocurrency with constant inflation of 7% per year. Its goal is to be a Medium of Exchange.

A couple questions:

How do you define "store of value"?

Can Bitcoin be other things in addition to a store a value? A "good" money a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a unit of account. Are you saying that Bitcoin is only a store of value and therefore not a good money?

too many ponzi-like sales chills out there

keep it simple:

today: not really a SoV

Who on earth can predict the future? - so only if there is a big viral (lol) global adoption in terms of use (incl gov and regulators == global) -> than you can compare to gold / other comodities


today: bad SoV, bad volatile asset, not regulatory friendly instrument (next - see what Bitcoin ticker locked down the original protocol to be THE regulator friendly Bitcoin - that scales)

Hodl and ponzl was the cancer = segwit

This is a good reading


https://coingeek.com/why-there-is-no-store-of-value-or-digital-gold-in-btc/

people just panicked and went crazy. if anything it shows the effects of unreasonable fear on the bitcoin price. and it wasn't directly linked to coronavirus but it was liked to everything else being dumped that caused fear in people expecting the same dump in bitcoin so they tried to act faster and caused the crash becasue of that!

as for Store of Value, if you mean bitcoin is a currency and like any other currency such as fiat, it is a store of value too. then i agree.

Defining Store of Value is a trap to walk into. The most accurate definition of a Store of Value is a store of VALUE. :) A close definition is a value that does not devalue with inflation. Some examples are gold, real estate. I think gold is the closest analogy. Real estate can be a Store of Value if the land is in high demand, like big metropolitans, agriculture lands. If you're in declining cities, like the US midwest areas, real estate is not a Store of Value. The US equity market can be considered a Store of Value. You've done well if you've invested after WW2. I'm not sure what the future holds for the equity market when we start having negative interest rates. My guess is it'll slowly lose its Store of Value status.

Bitcoin is unique because of its properties. I think it is a Store of Value on its own. It has two key differences from gold: (1) Its inflation will drop below gold and head to 0 (gold has 1.5% inflation rate), (2) It's very new (humans first used gold at least 40k years ago). These differences make Bitcoin more volatile. In the future, I think Bitcoin's market cap can match gold plus its 1.5% inflation.

Bitcoin is only a Store of Value. Bitcoin will not be a medium of exchange. Its supply cap of 21M is the reason. It's "good" money. It's desirable that people will dump other "bad" monies before they touch their bitcoins. I wrote an article on this topic:

https://bitflate.org/post/2019/11/24/bitcoin-will-not-be-a-medium-of-exchange.html

Other Bitcoin forks, BCH or BSV, face the same problem with 21M supply cap. Changing block size will not make a difference.

The author of this article misunderstood gold. Gold used to be technology before it became money. Humans learned how to manipulate metals with gold. Then we started making metal tools and weapons. Gold then became decorative. Its primary use is money. Nobody likes to carry gold nuggets around. It looks dumb. That's why they make gold into jewelry. Gold was money before jewelry.

But even considering this, what this dip proved to many is that bitcoin isn't all safe of mayor market swings when traditional markets are failing, and that's part of the reason why they could've gotten on crypto to begin with. I personally won't jump ship on bitcoin, but I'd understand if someone who got into it following Satoshi's idea of a safe haven suddenly doesn't want to support it anymore. They got in for the wrong reasons, but here's the catch, they already know the platform, they'll see the price go up over time and will probably get back into it.

People got upset and that's a very human reaction all things considered.

Despite the long and short term, Bitcoin is not a store of value.

The obvious reason for it is because it is volatile. People would say it is a store of value since it is giving a profit in the long term but still, it is so volatile to be a store of value.

I used to think a Store of Value needs to be stable. But maybe, that's wrong. A Store of Value does not need to be stable. The important requirement is to retain value over time. Bitcoin is digital and has 21M supply. There will never be enough. It is going to be volatile. Gold has 1.5% inflation rate. It's still volatile. Governments hoard gold to reduce its volatility. Gold screwed economies up badly over the years. People abandoned it. They don't like using gold as a medium of exchange because it's volatile. Gold has been a Store of Value for thousands of years.

Stock markets are volatile. Governments implement measures to stabilize the markets. Its stability is done through manipulation. We saw this in 2008 and now.

So a Store of Value is usually volatile. :)

A type of "money" with the supply that's not manipulated by people who own a printing press.

A type of "money" that can't be taken away from you, you control your keys.

A type of "money" that's censorship-resistant.


You can use Bitcoin as a medium of exchange anytime. 8)

Unit of account would come later with adoption, and stability.

That mindset is somehow helpful to prevent being problematic when the price of the bitcoin goes down. Being optimistic and understand reality is somehow effective to become more efficient in storing bitcoin. It is true that stock markets are volatile depending on the events or happenings around the world that can affect its value. For example, the covid-19 is surely a factor why bitcoin is in a $5000 USD right now. I hope that the government should work on this so that people will not have a hard time storing bitcoin on their own. Like promoting bitcoin, it helps us to increase the volume of people using it so the demand also increases. Gold and Bitcoin are the same because they have limited resources.

You are right,but speculative traders are what gives Bitcoin value.They pump the BTC market with liquidity,so the price can survive,even though there's a bullish trend or a big crash.The speculators are hungry for taking risk.They are "buying risk" by buying Bitcoins.If you remove price volaitility(and the element of high=big profit) from Bitcoin,all the speculative traders will be gone,thus the market liquidity will be gone,therefore the Bitcoin price will be very low,maybe even close to zero.The short-term speculations are what actually makes Bitcoin a store of value(yet,still very volatile).

The market price of the bitcoin fall down immediately because of having falling of market stock and also the spreading of the disease today and that was not quite a good news to the investor or the people made a lot of investment when the market price of it is too high and today we are now having a huge problem because the price of the bitcoin becomes more stable to the price of five thousand dollars and it takes again because it can earn a lot of profit on it still we cannot say that if you made a lot of investment when the market is too low because sometimes it became volatile and it may fall immediately and lose a profit for having a mistake on decisions.

Even if we talk about the long term prognosis , one can only speculate. 
The market is indifferent to the needs of investors and other cryptocurrencies related stuff , it rises and fall according to the demand and supply rule which is highly regulated by the Whales.
Amidst all this one should understand it depends on the person , when the chooses to sell .
He might have been holding for over an year and sells during a break down .
It's highly volatile and controlled by the whales .

Anything that can generate income is a store of value by definition (i.e. discounted cash flow), including land. Gold and Bitcoin don't generate income so their value must be derived from their utility. Without that utility, they are no more than a pyramid scheme.


There are three requirements for a good money:

• store of value
• medium of exchange
• unit of account

If Bitcoin is only a store of value, and is not (and can never be) a medium of exchange or unit of account, then Bitcoin is not (and will never be) a good money. Sorry.

I personally believe that there is a good chance that Bitcoin will become all three and become a good money in time. Otherwise, it will just fade away.

It's not necessary for Bitcoin to have utility. Bitcoin's utility can happen indirectly. For example, if Bitcoin serves as the incubation for other cryptocurrencies and technologies. The same thing happened to gold. Gold did not have utility. But it was the first metal that humans learned to extract 40k years ago. Gold started mining industries for other metals. Humans later found utilities of other metals as tools and weapons. Gold is a Store of Value. Its utility happens indirectly in other metals.

wrong. it IS mandatory for bitcoin to have utility otherwise it becomes some random numbers on your computer screen and without any value.

wrong. gold has at least 40 different utilities and that is the main reason why it has a value in first place.

The greatest haven of value has always been gold, history has shown it, in every crisis gold is always used, today there is Bitcoin, which is not considered a haven of value, for some scenarios of countries with inflation crises If it can turn out to be a great relief, but given the current circumstances due to the virus, all markets have fallen, including gold at 7%, so seeing Bitcoin as a haven of value is not recognized worldwide, perhaps due to its volatility, today day is a great investment to have gold and Bitcoin, it is what is always recommended.

This is misunderstanding of gold history. Maybe early crypto pioneers were eager to replace gold. They deleted a huge chunk of gold history and made it a shiny metal with silly utilities, like, jewelry. Silver as a color is more appealing than gold.

According to archeological evidence, the first metal that humans learned to manipulate was gold 40k years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy#History

Then we went through Upper Paleolithic (Late Stone Age), Mesolithic & Neolithic (End of Stone Age), Chalcolithic (Copper Age), Bronze Age, Iron Age.

Notice these progressions were marked by advances in metal technology. Gold started metal revolutions. It's scarce enough to become valuable. It's been used as a symbol. Copper, bronze, and iron were the utilities.

One of Bitcoin's main feature that gives it its utility is censorship-resistance, which requires it to be decentralized. Would Bitcoin have value if decentralization was removed, and be a "slow Paypal"?

Decentralization of Bitcoin is one of the main features for sure, but it isn't the only feature that gives value to bitcoin. Decentralized system itself is not very usefull for doing exchanges for goods. Desentalization helps to push monetary properties of Bitcoin through any obstacles such us borders, regulations, lack of banking services etc.

So, from my point of view, what makes bitcoin truly valuable is a combination of credibility of its monetary properties and bitcoin's ability to express these monetary properties through everything trying to stop that expression.

I would really agree with this and that is the reason why i am holding some of my bitcoins for long term.
The basic principle that I have put in mind until now is the law of supply and demand, and I always believe in the long run, the crypto adoption will increase and that would certainly make bitcoin less volatile and the value will increase, I have a big target on my holding, so I am still holding til now.

Not gonna panic for short term as a dump and a pump is quite normal for an asset that most of the volume are own by the whales.

I know right, although I am kinda thinking that coronavirus kinda affected some hodlers maybe not all of them. Maybe there were whales that panicked ot and caused them to sell a bunch causing this massive dumping that we're currently experiencing. Kinda sad that they brought their emotions to the table, but meh there's nothing we could do about it.
Bitcoin does both. Investment and utility but I believe that more people are into its own value.

Or it wouldn't fade away really. This has not been the first time bitcoin received a punch in the gut and even managed to reach an all time high. This is purely coincidental. Bitcoin is already on it's way to 12k until the news regarding COVID-19 pandemic kicked in and messed up not only bitcoin but the US STOCK MARKET as well. Provided that the US market is already recovering or at least that's what I can infer judging by the graphs and charts. There is a very high chance that bitcoin would bounce back as well. Although this further emphasizes that bitcoin while technically a store of value, isn't a really good one at that matter. A drop of more than 50% in just a couple of weeks already says a lot.

Whales deserved that kind of panic because they are taking advantage and abusing the value of bitcoin, they think that bitcoin is juts made for one purpose, to become rich. As they knew that the bitcoin were down, they suddenly sell and it is surely out of there plan and they are probably shocked. It is true that we have nothing to do about this kind of event in crypto, we just need to continue promoting it and patiently wait for its growth again. It is more likely that bitcoin will be more useful during this Covid-19 pandemic because no one is safe to go outside that's why government are implementing community quarantine to slow the rate of infected people than the people recovering from the virus.

The fundamentals of Bitcoin is and will always remain strong regardless of the situation we are facing, most especially if the kind of monetary system that we have right now will prevail for a longer time. So regardless of the short term rise and fall of Bitcoin's price, the long term is always positive. So if you want your money's worth to not only remain valuable over a long period of time but also to even increase, Bitcoin is one very nice choice. The temporary rise and fall could make you quicker money if you are good in speculating, though.

But I still don't see it becoming a "store of value" just yet, though bitcoin technically is a store of value. The high volatility rate of bitcoin in itself just wouldn't let bitcoin be a good saving method. That being said, there are other used that bitcoin can be utilized for during these times of great need. As of now digital transactions are more sought for because they are much safer as banknotes and coins contract viruses, and it's also important right now that everyone can online shop. Bitcoin is seeing a larger user base now compared to when everyone wasn't on lockdown, but digital fiat is still dominating the game. If we can promote its usage even more, there might be a shift in the industry.

I agree. Decentralization is a feature of Bitcoin, not a utility. It's a feature that enables digital SoV function. Bitcoin has a utility, you can transfer it to others. But this utility is a feature of Bitcoin's SoV function. It's not a widespread utility. This is the reason against big blocks. Some people try to scale this utility up to payment. It won't work because it's not a use case. It's like you're trying to make a hammer out of gold. You can certainly do that. Your gold hammer won't be good at hammering nails. You want to use steel for making hammers.

Bitcoin is a long-term Store of Value. It's not a medium of exchange during a crisis.

FYI, nothing from Coingeek is "good reading"
remember, Coingeek is Calvin Ayre (https://www.bitzy.com/2018/04/05/calvin-ayre/), known fraud who's side by side with the CSW (https://www.bitzy.com/2018/03/21/craig-wright/) fraud.

hv, wtf are you a noob?

Lol

Don't trust, verify. U reading  mostly fake news if u don't research own, down to the sources.

Coingeek does that quite ok.

It remains a store of value as long as we have its price on the rise or at a stable price, of which increasing price is always possible in the long term. So it becomes a good store of value provided you know the risks.

What I do not like is that some people are lazy and are just here to make money. So they are looking for complete full-proof methods to store their money in for future. Bitcoin is not something that can be keeping a high value all the time. It will drop in price move sideways, vulnerable to market risks. These people dont have any basic idea of what investing is and keep on making threads like these.

Even with fluctuation, bitcoin has already proven to be very useful. This is what gives it its value. If it wasn't useful, i wouldn't be holding at the value it has.

The infamous "backed on thin air" scenario never happened, it never went all the way down to zero (useless).

But can you say the same about fiat?  My country's fiat is the closest you can get to going nearly zero (lost 99.99999% value). Do you think the other fiats are immune to this? Due to the economic crisis, the Americans are already printing while moving interest rate into zero.

IF one of the major fiat collapses, it will pull the rest of the economy with it, but not bitcoin. This is because bitcoin is independent to the situation of particular countries or even the world economy. It is in fact a place to seek refuge in case such thing occurs. Bitcoin remains useful and secure, which gives it value.

@OP: You shouldn’t really be blaming such people. Most of them that are saying that are not even long term investors, they are just some people who are expecting the price of bitcoin to keep going up all the time and they want to be making profit within a short time and since it’s not working that they are worried about it. This is what is causing these people to be saying that Bitcoin is trash and that it’s not a store of a value.

Bitcoin can only be a store of value if you have the intention to hold it from now to a long time. I guess most people might have already started to realize the how strong bitcoin markets is doing even in this pandemic times. It may fluctuate but it will serve its original purpose of being a medium for storing value.

Store of Value. It is literally my way of receiving income since it is my means of payment. Only my bank account is used for my grocery purchases and bill payments. All my money is distributed in my digital assets.
Thanks for this post because it is useful for the community from my point of view.

"A store of value is an asset that maintains its value without depreciating". - the definition from Investopedia.
Saying that Bitcoin is good as a store of value in a long term based on the fact that during 2008-2015 Bitcoin was much cheaper in dollar equivalent than it is nowadays. But how will Bitcoin perform in some years? We can't guess, so calling Bitcoin a long-term store of value isn't correct.

People just panic and go insane. In the event it shows an alarming panic effect on bitcoin spending on anything. Also, it was not directly linked to the corona virus but intimidated people into expecting a similar dump to Bitcoin so that they could not get a kick out of the possibility of everything trying to work fast and cause an accident!

In the case of store-related events in which you are simply implying that Bitcoin can be a money and other cash, for example, Fiat, it is also a store of great value. This time I agree.

Yes, bitcoin volatility is the biggest risk that makes some people reconsider investing. Prices can indeed go up many times, but the opposite can also happen at any time. In addition to funds, investing in bitcoin also requires mental readiness, as if we are marketed. But this decade is enough to prove that bitcoin can be a very good alternative.

But it IS very useful for buying "goods". Especially for buying "goods" like Heroin. No one can stop you. 


I believe you also made the point I'm making, censorship-resistance.

You're saying the truth. Most people who are complaining about Bitcoin are not considering the long term price. They are only looking at the short term movement, and I do understand their reactions are based on when they started investing their money and started experiencing loss. Anyone that invests in cryptocurrency at a rate that is low, and HODL it for a long term, they will be able to make profit.

Right from the beginning, if you check the all time chart, you will notice that the lowest in every year is usually higher than the lowest for the past years just like you have explained, but people are not looking into that.

Cash is also useful for buying plenty of things including illegal ones. And it even doesn't need decentralized systems in order for cash to not be controlled and stopped. But this doesn't mean everyone would use cash for buying illicit stuff. It is money that is why you can buy everything you need and everything that has market value. If it were impossible to buy something useful with using of cash, it wouldn't be called money. Exactly the same happens to bitcoin. Bitcoin as a good example of money, probably the best money ever created by humans, can be used for buying both good things and not so good things. Otherwise, it wouldn't be money.

Is it not the volatility of the stock market that makes traders become attracted to it like bees to flowers? Similar case here. People buy bitcoin because they speculate on its prices to go up and sell to make a profit. Although the volatility a few months back was less than 5% per day but now with the halving coming in the prices have been soaring and dropping.

Investing in any risk based reward system need mental preparation and more important an entry and exit strategy. People fail mostly with all of these points and this leads to wrong decisions in the middle of the market and what we popularly call as "gone rekt".

You have a point with some investors viewing every market as speculative but there is major difference between a traditional stock market where the performance of the company can be monitored and their profit determines how well the price goes but in bitcoin there is nothing to base your valuation as it is speculation and luck.

As TUE mentioned the entry and exit is important in any investment not just bitcoin.
 

I think one of the key factors we should take into account to answer this question is how Bitcoin is used. If people use it to buy stuff, it's money. If they hodl during the hard times, it's a store of value (even if Bitcoin is going down but people keep holding it). Here we encounter the problem of 'people' as different humans use Bitcoin in different ways. For me, Bitcoin is something I'd like to be money, but effectively is a store of value. For a person who was about to lose a fortune because of holding stock that went rapidly down due to the pandemic, it can be a save haven. For people who bought some BTC with the stimulus money from the US it's an investment opportunity. Bitcoin is certainly many things, and perhaps we should look at how it's used rather than argue how it's supposed to be used.

If we like to see bitcoin as a good store of value, then we should hope for a massive adoption as only the real demand will appreciate its value.
Right now, it's still controlled by the whales, but in the future, quantity of users will beat them as they can't have this kind of power forever, so for now its not a good store of value but if you believe on its future, you should start holding now.

We can find a similarity with Gold and other precious metals here. People buy Gold because of its store of value but it can be sold anytime in the market. These are assets and not derivatives hence they are having a store of value but selling for liquid cash is possible.

It also depends on usage availability you know. People living in countries where bitcoin is not used, but they are buying bitcoin hoping in future their governments will allow it, is a risky bet but a worthy one if it works out.

This is tough to actually execute. Selling bitcoin in every country is not always possible. Only then you can buy stocks. :-[

Eh, thats an exaggeration, people are mostly using it to buy essential stuff, live first then invest. :D

The conflict of interest occurs because some people are disgruntled on price changes and they want everyone to hold bitcoin. That is not possible.

Correct

esp once the major cash function ( see the title of the white paper) was ripped off by btc devs and now you pay 5$ or more txs fees

thats a poor joke

I do get annoyed by people saying 1) bitcoin is supposed to be a safe-haven store-of-value, therefore 2) people should having flocked to bitcoin once CV19 hit, which didn't happen, therefore 3) bitcoin cannot be a safe-haven store-of-value.
I agree with your summary above in the sense that bitcoin is currently and was previously a highly speculative asset, and has the potential at some point in the future to become a store-of-value.
Bitcoin now and bitcoin 'end state' are very different things.

Your third line, I agree.
Your second line, I would argue that a store-of-value should increase, at least intermittently (we are measuring against fiat). Bitcoin needs to be stable if it is to be used as a currency, not as a store-of-value.
But the reasoning in lines 2 and 3 undermine your first line, because you are talking about the past. You can't say that bitcoin will never in future be a store-of-value ("at any time"), and base this conclusion entirely on what bitcoin has been so far.
Bitcoin certainly has the potential to become a safe-haven and a store-of-value. Of course it isn't yet, because of the volatility, which is largely a consequence of the comparatively thin markets... but it's difficult to deny that potential.

Some people are really confused to be sincere. I don't know what they see Bitcoin as ::). Just during the pandemic they were saying that Bitcoin is not a store of value and they said a lot of things that really annoys, and moreover nobody said that Bitcoin is a store of value, it's called a peer-to-peer payment method. If you choose to make it a store of value, then it's up to you.

Looking at the Bitcoin chart on a long term as the op has said, you will notice that if you have been holding Bitcoin for a long term you would have made profit, because the price keeps growing every year or two. But that's not how most people see it, they want the price to keep going up every time they invest their money.

Exactly my view, that's why I made a post on this forum that Bitcoin is not a get-rich-quick scheme, rather it is an investment for the future.
 Invest in Bitcoin today, and watch it grow to something incredible, it is evident in the journey of bitcoin since the past few years.

BTC is still a highly speculative asset. It is still long way ahead to obtain a status of store of value. Moreover we are likely to go deep again very soon (read this https://newsblockchain.io/news/bitcoin-targets-6-7k-levels-as-the-attempts-to-break-out-10k-failed ) and it also won't bring us any closer to a status of store of value..

Right, and price is always a function of value and speculation

Where is the value?

 Bitcoin shows promising technology and I highly recommend any of my collegues to invest in it.

And as to the context of Bitcoin as "store of value", well I could say "nahhh'...

Simply because of the goal, purpose, and used case.

1. Goal - Based on its whitepaper  https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf (https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf), the goal is to become a decentralized online monetary system that will interrupt the current financial system. As the result, it becomes "speculative asset" - people seeing it as financial instrument.
This simply explains:

2. Purpose - enabling peer to peer transaction and avoid double-spending. Yes, it was achieved since many or most of the crypto functions the same. So what`s the difference among other cryptos out there, none.

Off course, the unique nature of Bitcoin makes it a lot more better than other alternative cryptocurrency? Bitcoin as having scarce supply now tend to show something investors want - financial haven.

3. Used case - So far, not a thing I would heard about Bitcoin as an instrument to sustain without third parties in the making. You could not used Bitcoin if it has no monetary value in fiat. And never heard of something relevant about BTC, aside from: "it hits the mainstream market with its very volatile price movement" and not because of Covid right?

Conclusion, as BTC may become one of today`s competing financial instrument (store of value or revolutionary alternative to Gold) one thing is sure - without the current financial system, it will be very difficult for Bitcoin to function according to what its whitepaper`s mission and vision. Thus, difficult to be adopted...

It takes working side-by-side with the current system [Government and Bitcoin Community].

PS. [Opinionated]
 

Many people take Bitcoin as a way to invest, they see Bitcoin like a stock, buy and hold Bitcoin in a short term with their hope of being rich easily in a short time like so many people have done before.
I know that's one-sidedly viewed but think about the outsider, they don't actually know how Bitcoin works, the only thing they know is that Bitcoin is expensive and so many people have been rich because of it. The more people think like that, the idea will spread without needing anyone to talk about it, it will lean deep down into everyone's heart.  :-\

And why not? Bitcoin is here and each of us can use it differently! It's a beauty of bitcoin, it can be a store of value, if you are investing and holding bitcoin is a store of value for you. What you two talk about here is trading, speculating, and yes btc can be used for that too, it can be used as a mean of exchange, to buy things with bitcoin. Bitcoin is what you want it to be.
Why people have a desire to label everything around, this is for that or that, why not be for more than one thing? And you need to be open-minded about that, today you will use it for holding, tomorrow for trading if you want, changes are a perfectly normal thing, do what you like and what you think it's best for you.

There are many people in the world who have never used computers, never seen ones, never had enough money to buy it. Some just don't need them. However, one of the advantages of bitcoin is it can be used with a standart cheap cell phone as an application or digital wallet. While many can't afford buying laptops or PC, they can afford mobile devices. For people living in the countries with unstable economic it might be a good way to save money, especially when their currency keeps debasing every day. Bitcoin is risky, volatile, still new asset, but it is not as risky as national currency in some countries.

Is it really a store of value? ??? The way I see it, it all depends on whether you’re going long term or short term. For a short term I wouldn’t call it a store for value, you’re just investing and trying make some profit from the fluctuating price of BTC. And when I say long term, I mean at least two years. If you check the price of Bitcoin, every year or two, it will appreciate to a level that is more than what it was before.

You’re only going to have some problem if you buy during a bull run when the price is already at its peak. Then you might be waiting for a long time before you recover the loss. Moreover, a store of value asset should remain with least possible fluctuations so that people will not lose their networth over the time; I agree bitcoin is bullish on long term but how it will help short term investors.

If you bought at $20k and sold at $3k, then it is not store of value

If you hold for 3+ years, it is always store of value (thus far)

haha, extrapolating such would mean if you got 2-3 children in 10 years - getting big family after 50y ?

 :D

I was not here during 2013 - 2014, but I strongly believe that there were trolls, haters, nocoiners, altcoiners who laughed at HODLers of that time too. 8)

Two years is still somewhat mid to long term in my opinion, because it is a subjective scale comparing to the stock market, I would say at least 6-7 years is a good long term period for holding bitcoin. Because of the drastic fall that happened after 2017 Q4 and now that the market price has reached above 9k USD, people are at profit. However this was not the case back in 2012-13,14. Bitcoin was in 3digit price figures at that time.

Here comes the importance of portfolio management. One needs to increase/decrease the weight-age of bitcoin and other assets with time to manage their fund properly.

Much comes from the derivatives markets which have recently boomed a lot. Also the short term trading strategies for day trading is there. No guaranteed profit but some people like that.