What gives BTC its value?

What gives BTC its value?

The same thing that gives the USD value. Someones word.

Do you trust that person?

protip: until FDIC started insuring deposits, banks would periodically experience "bank runs" where people lost faith in the bank liquidity and all tried to cash out at the same time, destroying the bank and temporarily fucking shit up.

5000+ nuclear warheads?

Yeah I do trust them.

It's hard to say what you can use it for however - The USD has many possibilities. BTC not so much

wrong. it makes the largest supercomputer in the world, and lets everyone keep a copy of the bank.

If we get to that point your money means nothing anyway. Learn to shoot, have a heart to kill, and pray for the best. Some gold dust and a wrist watch isnt going to do much

The fact that other people think it's worth something. Also the fact that it can be used for drugs and doesn't have a federal government that controls it

It's utility.

How else can you buy drugs on the internet?
How else can you sell drugs on the internet?
How else can you move money from chinkostan to freedomland without losing a large cut of it?

It's also the "safest" crypto.

How is this a fucking question in 2017 and how are there so many stupid fucking answers above me?

also, if properly secured, its one of the only assets the government can never get from you

...

Low information Chinese bagholders. Buy Ethereum.

The same thing that gave gold its value before it was used in consumer electronics.

It boggles my mind that people still think that bitcoin is nothing, the network has the most computing power of the planet.

Citation needed

I just read a story about how the danes have found a way to track bitcoins.

the demand for it. The main demand for bitcoin comes from illicit markets and Veeky Forums turbonerds, so its a pretty big market

A black market for illegal stuff and anonymous purchasing.

>wake up
>realize I need to hire employees for my service businesses
>always hired off of referrals
>never used a hiring platform

I need help guys. Do people even use craigslist to hire people anymore? A job ad on craigslist in my area is $45

Use indeed.com?

Fucking referals when you don't have a foot in the door.

my meth cravings

Nothing.

Most of bitcoin's use is in stuff that doesn't really contribute highly to the overall economy: online gambling or the purchasing of illegal drugs. Only around 100,000 online merchants currently accept bitcoin, which represents something like 0.3-0.8% of worldwide merchants. So its legitimate exposure is small, and its use is even smaller. According to Blockchain, around 345,021 bitcoins changed hands on March 1, 2017. Given that the chart for estimated number of bitcoins changing hands per day is highly volatile but seems to be on a generally flat trend, we'll go ahead and use that as our estimate of daily transaction volume. That means that, per day, at the current exchange rate of $1259 per BTC, only $434.4 million are exchanged daily around the globe through Bitcoin. In 2008, the total value of all financial transactions globally was $2.2 quadrillion, so using 2008 figures, only 0.007% of all global financial transactions were carried out using Bitcoin. The actual proportion using up-to-date numbers is probably even smaller.
0.007% isn't actually the value that matters for Bitcoin.
The average consumer doesn't give a shit about buying drugs or gambling online, so most transactions with Bitcoin aren't valuable transactions. Back in 2014, 2.5% of the daily transaction volume for Bitcoin was for retail. Let's say that today the number has increase substantially to 10%. That means that less than 0.0007% of daily global financial transactions are retail transactions with Bitcoin. Furthermore, in 2014, it's estimated that only 1 out of every 4000 online retail transactions was done with Bitcoin. Its low usage levels aren't helped by the fact that most people who get Bitcoin use it as investment rather than as actual currency: in 2014 U.S. Federal Reserve researchers found that a vast majority of addresses used to hold and exchange bitcoins had been dormant for at least 4 months.

1/2

This means that most people who get Bitcoin don't actually get them to buy things online or use them in monetary transactions, they get them to sell them off at a higher value later on. While that's pretty much what all investing is, that this is done by a huge majority of bitcoin holders is indicative of a greater fool situation.

So in conclusion, Bitcoin's current value is fucking absurd and not backed by any rational metric or idea. Its online market for illegal and anonymous purchasing simply isn't large enough to justify its current exchange rate, nor is its use in retail purchases.
(Side note: Bitcoin isn't even that anonymous anymore. Criminal investigative agencies are getting better at tracking them.)

This is stupid because gold got its value from humans being gaping dumb fucking apes who become entranced by anything shiny and pretty. Gold was used in jewelry which became a status of wealth and value, which is why gold became a valuable material originally. That was pre-Bretton Woods. After the Nixon shock, gold's value came about through inflation, global reserves, and its use as a hedge against poor market performance.

This has been proven wrong in the case of Tomáš Jiříkovský.