> As a thought experiment: If one person bought up all the bitcoin in the world and monopolized it, would it be valuable or worthless? The answer is clearly "wo

> As a thought experiment: If one person bought up all the bitcoin in the world and monopolized it, would it be valuable or worthless? The answer is clearly "worthless". This is a good place to highlight where we fundamentally disagree. Assuming this is just an temporary situation (i.e. miners are still operational) and the person with all the bitcoin was committed to selling it slowly, the bitcoin would be extremely valuable. There would be enormous demand for the time-proven, hardest asset mankind has ever seen and hardly any supply of it coming onto the market. Most of the value in the world is stored. It is always looking for a better home, and there is no better home than bitcoin. Gold isn't valuable because of any usefulness as a material - it's because of its fundamental attributes relevant to being a store of value: divisible, extremely robust, non-fungible, portable, easily to assay/recognisable, scarce etc. It is the optimal physical substance for use as a store of value that requires divisibility and liquidity (relative to say, real estate). Bitcoin is the digital counterpart, and being digital has numerous benefits: perfectly scarce (above-ground gold doubles every ~40 years), way more portable (you can store it in your head and send it around the world in minutes), you can buy/sell it in any quantity 24/7 from a phone, the node you connect to assays it automatically, it can be better protected from theft (multisig etc). This is why it is demonetising gold over time - it's beating it at its own game. It's beating real-estate as a store of value, bonds. Soon pensions. Not only that, but with higher-level payment rails, it can beat fiat at it's own game. When I say bitcoin is what it is - I'm talking about these fundamental monetary qualities. How Satoshi envisioned we'd make use of them is irrelevant. Also, I should add that an asset has to first find it's potential as a store-of-value before it has any shot at being a medium-of-exchange or unit-of-account, because otherwise it's value will change too much, while it grows, to be of use for those things. The reason fiat currencies never went through this process to become a medium of exchange is because they are tokens, boot-strapped into value by representing the existing time-proven, market-saturated hard asset and taking on its stabilised value, and established status as unit-of-account, similar to what Tether has done (what a house of cards that is! - a token representing a token representing....nothing anymore) The key to understanding the bitcoin proposition is to understand why and how gold became so valuable thousands of years ago (and it's not because it's shiny and electrically conductive). Bitcoin is following the same path, albeit in a much-accelerated way due to our increased knowledge and communication ability nowadays.