I'll make it to the point since I was in on bitcoin back in the cpu crunch days too:
1. As a medium of exchange. This was what the global community, and more particularly the techie community behind it wanted to use it as. We wanted a quick way to exchange payment across the globe without dealing with shitty companies like Paypal etc.
but at some point, it became instead
2. A store of value. I'm not sure the order of effect on this, but then rich people who had the ability to influence the network effect started dumping real money into it, further inflating the price. I theorized at one point the central banks might have even participated on the dl, just because it's an easy bet to hedge on if you can poof money from thin air like they can.
I think #2 has completely overtaken it's use as #1, and due to that and other factors, I expect a major collapse at some inevitable but undetermined point in the future.
My personal evaluation and why I skipped bitcoin was because I saw that it did not have privacy protections built in, which is what the early coin community wanted (or so I thought). I kick myself for not keeping a few blocks sometimes (at one point I think I spent ~20 btc on a food order!), but oh well.
1. As a medium of exchange. This was what the global community, and more particularly the techie community behind it wanted to use it as. We wanted a quick way to exchange payment across the globe without dealing with shitty companies like Paypal etc.
but at some point, it became instead
2. A store of value. I'm not sure the order of effect on this, but then rich people who had the ability to influence the network effect started dumping real money into it, further inflating the price. I theorized at one point the central banks might have even participated on the dl, just because it's an easy bet to hedge on if you can poof money from thin air like they can.
I think #2 has completely overtaken it's use as #1, and due to that and other factors, I expect a major collapse at some inevitable but undetermined point in the future.
My personal evaluation and why I skipped bitcoin was because I saw that it did not have privacy protections built in, which is what the early coin community wanted (or so I thought). I kick myself for not keeping a few blocks sometimes (at one point I think I spent ~20 btc on a food order!), but oh well.