Don't only think of it as having a speculative value. Think of it also as having the utility of being able to write to an immutable public ledger. Think of "Bit

Don't only think of it as having a speculative value. Think of it also as having the utility of being able to write to an immutable public ledger. Think of "Bitcoin the currency" as a commodity that lets you write to the Bitcoin blockchain like how ink is a commodity that let's you write on paper. You don't need to use much Bitcoin in order to secure a lot of data with a timestamp and signature. This makes it great for synchronizing all sorts of transactional data across service boundaries meaning people can bring their ownership rights from provider to provider. With something like keybase.io you're reliant on them to authorize the link between a name and your public key. You're also reliant on the DNS system. All of this adds unnecessary friction to the concept of individual ownership of digital properties like domain names to say nothing of owning the rights to a named module of published open source code. The speculative value is what drives the mining process. It's a dirty little trick and yes, it encourages a bunch of people near cheap hydro power to buy a bunch of machines that do nothing other than play the SHA-256 lottery. You can still have zero interest in the speculative value of Bitcoin. That's the miners concerns. Your concerns can just be the transactional fees that let you embed your own data in the consensus ledger.