I don't know what you mean by "characteristics." Everything has characteristics, that doesn't mean everything has intrinsic value. As for the second point, bitcoin doesn't have intrinsic value, and neither does cash. If the government didn't establish the dollar as official currency, dollars would not have any value by themselves. That's why they aren't intrinsically valuable; their value is assigned to them.

Yes, air's value is intrinsic since it comes from its utility. It's also virtually worthless because it's freely available and common. If that wasn't the case, air would have a market value, and that value would derive from it's intrinsic value (utility). In fact, we do have a market for air for those in need. People who are on an oxygen tank have to pay for the air in that tank. As you pointed out, those people need it to survive and can't breathe it naturally from the atmosphere, so the value of the air in that tank comes from its utility by the people who need it to survive.

This choice wouldn't be hard for me either, but it's the exact opposite of your sentiment. Any amount of considerable wealth I would keep in a stable currency where I could be reasonably certain what the value would be week to week and month to month. Nobody has a reasonable basis to say 30 days from now if bitcoin will be worth the same as it is now. Bitcoin is down more than 10% in the last 30 days. That'd be $100,000 loss if it was bitcoin in your scenario. It could just as easily go back up, but everyone is convinced that it will, which is the sign of a bubble.

Jim Rogers is a blowhard. He makes a living by forecasting doom and gloom scenarios. His track record on his predictions is horrible. All that aside, if a financial collapse were to happen, I would expect Bitcoin to fall hard. This price is propped up by speculators and gamblers looking to get rich quick. In a financial crisis, money flows away from the riskiest assets first, and as the current King of speculative vehicles, there's nothing riskier than Bitcoin. When all the money is fleeing to safety, there'll be nothing to prop up the price of Bitcoin.

Transaction fees have risen to the point where Bitcoin cannot compete with banks. That was originally one of the great promises of Bitcoin, and now the network congestion is causing far too many problems that will inhibit future growth. Things are certainly not fine as is, Bitcoin is at capacity, and future growth is inhibited by the network congestion and sky high fees. If Bitcoin is unable or unwilling to address these issues, there are only 500 other cryptos eager to steal market share by adopting common sense solutions.

What is regulation if not control? While Bitcoin started off as a completely unregulated entity/ecosystem, the more people who get involved, the more likely regulation is. People will demand it, out of a sense for their own protection. Regulation is not automatically bad.

Network congestion brought on by limited block size (in conjunction with spam attacks) have pressured transaction fees. You're right that the fees are prohibitively expensive now. The inability to deal with this comes down to special interests now; essentially people with Bitcoin-caused riches who are afraid to take any action that will devalue their wealth. That's why consensus about what to do is so difficult now. This is inevitable though whenever this much wealth is created, it's not a unique problem for Bitcoin. I think people just naively assumed Bitcoin would be different.  

The biggest problem is what merchants want to accept a currency they can't reasonably predict the value of in a few days? In a few days, Bitcoin can - and regularly does - lose 20% of its value. That makes conducting business denominated in bitcoins impossible. Even the merchants currently accepting Bitcoin use a third party to immediately process the transaction to fiat. That's the only way they can be sure to retain the profit of the goods they sold.

Stock has nothing to do with it, but it is overpriced in the sense that its value far outweighs its utility. But that's a separate point.

Bitcoin is denominated in dollars as well as other currencies, but if you're trying to sell the idea that the loss of the world's most stable currency from the market would mean "nothing negative" for the traders in every other currency, well that's a terrible position you've backed yourself into defending! Especially considering that it's the excess wealth created by our currently stable world economy that gives speculative assets their value. Guess what happens if everything goes to chaos... speculative assets crash. That's what the Great Depression and the Great Recession showed, as well as the Dotcom crash. All of it was speculation driven nonsense, and when the mania couldn't sustain the overpriced assets anymore, all that money that was propping up the speculative assets fled to safer assets. But I'm sure Bitcoin is the one speculative exception that would continue to thrive when a bulk of the buying pressure propping it up disappears, right? That's what you have to believe to argue from your side of it.

I would gladly trade the high volatility for a lower and more stable price. If I had the choice between bitcoin being trading between $2500 and $3000 and being between $1750 and $1755 dollars, I would take the lower price range. The difference is huge. I would be poorer in dollar terms by quite a lot, but the wild price swings in that scenario makes bitcoin relatively useless for commerce and business. Under the second scenario, the bitcoins are worth a lot less, but trade in a small enough range that they could be useful for both commerce and business by allowing people to have a reliable expectation of what their bitcoin holdings are worth. That's what I crave most from btc.

Well of course, nobody with money is going to lend it to you out of the goodness of their own heart. Lending involves risk that you won't pay them back, and they can reduce this risk by demanding collateral.  Interest is the "penalty" you pay for consuming something in the present you don't have the money to consume. Houses are expensive, so it's common for people to use loans to purchase them. For anything else, you ought to consider if paying interest to consume it now is a better option than waiting until you have the money to afford it.

You didn't address anything of substance. You simply continued on without addressing the fact that you are claiming that trouble at bitfinex should tank bitcoin under my theory, which flat out isn't close to what I wrote. I said specifically, "when the next international financial crisis happens, people will flee bitcoin for safer assets, and the price will crash hard." You responded with 'but bitfiniex and price appreciation.'  So would you like to continue propagating the delusion that bitfinex constitutes a global financial crisis so you can try to conclude me theory to be inaccurate, or would you like to let a little more reality color your views?

Intrinsic value isn't only things people "need" but things where the value comes innately from the object. You can think of intrinsic value as a synonym for "utility."  Does something have value because it is useful, or is its value arbitrary? For example, silver is used in far more industrial applications than a metal like gold. Silver has more intrinsic value because it is useful for things people need to do, whereas gold's value is more arbitrary. It's just valuable because everyone agrees it is. (This is not a perfect example since gold has some industrial or medical uses, but overall it is a generally good illustration of intrinsic vs. arbitrary value.)

You haven't played enough to increase the reward, but also, your reward has not decreased.

The % is just a progress indicator to the next level. Your progress to the next level is determined by the ratio of how much you gamble vs. how much you claim for free. Every time you claim free sats, your ratio falls. Every time you gamble, your ratio rises. If you are gambling with small amounts, it will take a long time to get to the reward boost. But always remember, the more you claim for free, the more you have to gamble to get the reward. That's how it's supposed to work. Gambling is a business, this is designed to get you to gamble more. Don't complain about it, just be aware of how it works.

Simple answer is small sample size. The smaller your sample size is, the more likely you are to get variance. That's why it has worked for you so far. Mathematically we can prove that the more rolls you play with this method, the greater the likelihood of losses gets. So any time you are in variance that shows profit, that is what you would call "luck."

People who always go against the crowd sentiment end up getting destroyed by the market, since crowd sentiment is essentially what determines what is successful and what is not in capitalist markets. Every market is just the expression of crowd sentiment. The crowd gets irrational from time to time, which creates opportunity. But opperating on the assumption that the crowd is always wrong is a recipe for ruin.

Just because volatility is normal doesn't make the losses any less significant. A 20% loss of capital is a 20% loss of capital, whether something is fairly stable (like the USD) or very volatile (like BTC).  The only difference is whether you appropriately considered the likelihood of the' bloodbath.'

BTC and USD are both fairly anonymous currencies (neither is perfectly anonymous). The government creates black markets, and black markets require anonymity. Anything that grants that is likely going to be used on those black markets.

He's right about the mania. Every other post in this thread is about how great of a time it is to buy because the price is dropping and everyone posting sentiment like that believes it is garaunteed to go back up. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing is garaunteed about price,  and ultimately you could make money if you buy now, but if you're doing so because you think you're guaranteed to make profit, you're just a lucky idiot.

The inflationary risks of holding wealth in USD pales in comparison to the volatility risks of holding wealth in Bitcoin. The federal reserve targets an inflation rate of 2% per year. Bitcoin reguarly hits swings of 25% in a single week. Do not let bitcoin's LONGTERM general upward trend disguise the actual risk of of severe short term losses when you may need cash. To the rational investor, it's not even a question.