Humans care about goods, not about currency for the sake of currency. Just because a tiny group of people cares about currency for the sake of currency doesn’t mean that makes it a reliable medium of exchange for people outside that group.
The Somali shilling is not widely used as tissue paper, and is not widely used for fire starting. It is a paper currency entirely backed by the cost it takes to create, print, and transport. Clearly Humans care about currency for the sake of currency, otherwise the Somalis would have stopped using it 20 years ago.
1 million times 0 is still 0.
A possible use makes it non-zero. I have no use for gold as jewlery, gold fillings, or electrical conduction. Yet I own gold.
Possible use neither makes it a reliable medium of exchange. Clayton explained well what requirement a good has to be suitable as a medium of exchange and it’s the opposite of no use / possible use.
and yet this is exactly what you are claiming gives gold it’s value. A Possible use as jewlery or electrical conduction, even though most people no longer use it for that.
Let’s go back to water and robinson curuso for this. He has 10 gallons of water. He can use it for drinking, or bathing. He choses drinking because he get’s greater utility from that, but the fact that he doesn’t use it for bathing doesn’t mean that the water isn’t worth the amount of bathing he could use it for if he couldn’t drink the water for some reason.
Let’s go to bitcoin. I could use it to exchange for server subscription, or captcha. I’m sure you can figure out the rest of this paragraph.
So I think this is your main objection. RIGHT NOW, people are not using bitcoin for captcha, nor do they have the ability to because nobody has developed a method for doing that. Which leads us to future valuation. You seem to be claiming that potential future valuation can’t be a basis for current valuation. This in and of itself is a denial of the valuation of capital goods. Bitcoin is not substantially different from the valuation of capital goods because the consumption goods created by it may be substantially lower in value than the estimated value of the goods when the capital project was started. Similarily, bitcoins captcha potential value my not be reached by the time speculators have speculated it would. This is no different than the failure of valuation of the capital good. This however doesn’t deny that the capital good has some value, but just not as much as predicted. It may very well be that bitcoin is over valued, but it’s a non sequitur to say it has no value due to that.
I’m probably the most senior member here in favor of bitcoin (at least arguing that it’s not praxiologically certain to not be a money). I just want to clarify, I own precisely .04 bitcoins, which I got for free from bitcoin faucet, and bitcoin bonus.