The world does not run on power and hierarchy.
Sometimes they get caught up in the outermost, quasi red-herring type of stuff, like whether or not Bitcoin will replace the dollar.
Bitcoin will replace the dollar (or first maybe be held on reserve to back the dollar), but obviously that doesn't happen overnight.
I say it's sort of a red-herring because really it's more like the dollar (and other fiat) erode and gradually lose relevance, rather than someone gets on the television and says "folks, it's gonna be Bitcoin now".
Obviously it flies in the face of what their corrupt textbooks taught them about economics and money (so they don't buy bitcoin but they talk about it a lot while other people get rich).
They're triggered and need to try to rationalize it every time Bitcoin writes a new chapter. And a cheat code for this is they'll do it on terms that they're most familiar with, i.e. hard money vs centrally managed money and just insert Bitcoin where historically they'd talk about gold.
(They're wrong in both cases, but it's the back and forth thing where neither side has an easy time nailing the other to the wall.)
Really the idea that Bitcoin has purpose or value doesn't even hinge on it being currency.
Denying that it has value means you deny that a censorship resistant way to pass information back and forth has value.
That's what Bitcoin is -- bits of information go back and forth in a way that's mathematically guaranteed to be authentic, even tho no party controls the platform.
A decentralized messenger.
(You can write things and attach text to a bitcoin transfer, if you wanted to.)
HOPEFULLY there doesn't come a day where we actually need the messenger aspect of it.
But it's always good that it's there.
It's like you probably don't need to videotape or worry about what the police officer will do to you today. You'll probably be fine. But if there didn't exist videotape or some mechanism of holding their feet to the fire, it would evolve to get bad.
Bitcoin is like the videotape. Any centralized party (or collusion of them -- Facebook, Google, etc.) knows that there's no way to truly control digital information, and they now have no reason to develop this motivation.
Instead they know they have to be decent, and if there was too much irresponsibility and distrust, Bitcoin could start being used this way.
I know that's kind of a mind-bender and different than the way we typically think about Bitcoin.
Most people, quite understandably, don't know too much about what Bitcoin is. And as such they shy away from making any claims or expecting anyone should listen to them.
But the Keynesians who talk about it and tell us what's going on as tho they expect that it means something and we should listen to them... don't really have an excuse to not know what it is.
But that's what it is. It's information going back and forth.
(And you could build things like Steemit on top of it, to display text in blog or messenger form.)
It was a mathematical breakthrough, to discover a way to do this without centralized oversight.
And then from there ,,, now that this exists and will probably always exist and the more you say no the more someone somewhere will have a reason to want to ... it's reasonable to expect that the floodgates are open for the bits to, one day, be used as currency.
In the same way salt and seashells and gold evolved a monetary purpose in the non-digital realm.
Hence, speculators who see the light of day realize that -- even if we may be decades or centuries away from it being a commonly used currency -- it should ramp up in value ahead of time as more people connect the dots.
The end.
So, to continue, it having value doesn't really even hinge on whether it will replace fiat.
That's the outermost extreme that people like to argue against.
(They're wrong about that too, but it's more theoretical and easier to wiggle around than if you hit them with the fundamentals and why it indeed has value.)
Rarely do critics of Bitcoin ever concede that it does have some value. They try to hide behind "oh, it won't replace the dollar, c'mon" as a proxy for arguing that it has no value.
And the tldr of what I'm saying here is you have to think there's no point to people being able to freely express information to think there's no point to Bitcoin.
Β―_(γ)_/Β―
And that's a pretty messed up place to be. That's when you need to rethink the whole chain of beliefs.
The world does not run on power and hierarchy. Write it on the chalkboard 100 times.
Take your head out of your corrupt little textbook and write it on the chalkboard 100 more times. Good Keynesian. You're learning.
People cooperating (spontaneously and in a decentralized way) is what's driving our ship. Power and hierarchy leech off of that and pick at that for their own gains, and try to take credit as tho they're driving.
And some people believe them. They're called the Keynesians.