If it's the new gold, an asset that doesn't seem to have an intrinsic value (You need a greater fool, although unlike gold, bitcoin doesn't have other uses) you need to find someone to take it off your hands. It's just hard for me to grasp that anything that I can't see or control has any value. Again I comeback to thin air, I can't see it, I can't touch it, I can't drop it on my foot. How do I value something like that.
You're still stuck in the analog way of thinking instead of the digital way. There have been many profound changes in our lives that brought immense value and efficiency through the digitizing process.
First, we digitized knowledge. We used to go to Barnes and Noble for physical books to obtain more knowledge. We held physical newspapers. We bought magazines. But then we digitized all that so that knowledge that previously existed in various physical forms now exists as 1's and 0's in digital form. Now we just download the book from Amazon and read it on our kindle. Or instead of buying the magazines or newspapers, we have subscriptions to websites or visit free sites supported by digital advertising instead.
Second, we digitized sound, pictures and video. If you wanted to listen to music, in years past that required the purchase of a Vinyl Record, Cassette tape, or CD. Now you just download whatever song you want from an endless collection of millions by using Spotify or Apple Music.
We used to buy cameras that could accommodate physical rolls of film, and then later printed those pictures out on paper. Now we can use digital cameras built into our phones and edit those pictures as needed right on the device and send them to anyone on the planet in seconds.
We used to put all of our printed photos in albums, and would pull the albums out when we wanted to show photos to family and friends. These days the physical photo album has been digitized as well so now we upload all of our shareable digital photos to Facebook for our family and friends to see whenever they want, regardless of where they live.
Watching a video on TV required the purchase of a Beta or VHS tape in past decades and most recently a DVD. Now we can watch anything by streaming it digitally via YouTube or Netflix.
And now what you're witnessing today is the digitizing of money. We now understand that money and stores of value don't need to be synonymous with physical objects like paper bills and precious metals. We can construct digital monetary systems like Bitcoin that exhibit all of the properties of excellent money better than any type of money created before, which are:
- Scarcity: resistance to money supply manipulations and, thus, dilutions to its monetary unit value (difficult to produce)
- Divisibility: ease of accounting and transacting at various scales (separable and combinable units)
- Portability: ease of moving value across space (high value to weight ratio)
- Durability: ease of moving value across time (resilient to deterioration)
- Recognizability: ease of identifying and verifying the monetary value by other parties in a transaction (universally identifiable and verifiable)
