Bitcoin has a strong base of advocacy not based on any logic or utility but solely sprung from the mule stubbornness of those who profited from their speculation.
1. Bitcoin is environmentally damaging. It produces 37 megatons of CO2 per year and consumes 78 terawatt-hours of electricity annually. Much of that electric consumption is powered by coal. Not all energy consumption or CO2 output is bad, but value should be provided commensurately to society for the damage incurred. And yet:
2. It is a terrible currency. Promoters claimed we could pay for things with Bitcoin, that it'd replace fiat currency. But the design of Bitcoin in particular makes it an awful currency. To prevent deflation, a currency should be able to increase its supply to maintain reasonably constant velocity as demand increases for it as a medium of exchange. With its limited number of coins, Bitcoin cannot increase supply to maintain velocity: its only solution is to fractionalize, a form of deflation. And deflation is what we get. Massively: everything you own, and all your income, constantly becomes worth less expressed in Bitcoin, day after day.
3. It's a terrible currency, part two: currencies should have very low transaction costs. Bitcoin transaction costs exceed $20. The response to this is to recentralize it in the form of services that cheaply transact Bitcoin rights management through traditional databases. Eliminating the very value proposition of Bitcoin.
4. After having given up on defending it as a currency, the next claim is that it's a "store of value." But stores of value should have some degree of consistency of value: volatility is not a virtue. Bitcoin supporters are right that fiat currency, to the degree it is exposed to inflation, is at risk of not being the best store of value, which is why we don't normally keep huge amounts of resources piled up as cash. But Bitcoin is an awful store of value because it has no fundamental utility that moderates its price swings. Normal assets - real estate, bonds, gold - have some sort of fundamental utility or cash flow that helps to moderate price action over time. The asset must have some sort of use first, then it can become a good store of value. Because of the above flaws, Bitcoin has no good use, which thusly makes it a poor store of value.
None of this is a fundamental problem of crypto, just Bitcoin. Crypto could be very useful! But with many millionaires minted from a lucky speculation and their entire ego reliant on deceiving themselves that their speculation was clairvoyance, critiques of Bitcoin are invariably met with a flea market of intellectually mangy defenses that ultimately boil down to saying "well, look at its price!"
You have many severely fundamentally misunderstood ideas about Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is "money" and not a "currency." Bitcoin works very wonderfully as money.
Bitcoin is not very wasteful in energy, contrary to the pushed narrative by those that want everyone to believe this is truth. Bitcoin uses a tiny fraction, currently around 7-9% of the electricity that the global banking system currently uses. Bitcoin uses a very large portion of renewable energy sources, and will continue to balance it's energy use towards efficiency and optimizations.
Your part 2/3 etc, it's not a currency. Bitcoin is pure money. We also do not really ever use gold for currency. It is money. Bitcoin is a better money than gold. Once you stop drumming on the wrong path, you'll more easily understand the differences and stop banging your head about how it's a bad currency. It's not a great currency, while it is the very best form of money.
Your whole bit about meandering into defending it's value as currency or store of value, is just highlighting your total misunderstanding of the value of gold, or the new digital version of gold as money. Money IS a store of value.
Lastly, Bitcoin really has no fundamental problems. Nobody that knows about bitcoin gives a flying fuck about the price.
It's sad reading comments like this from bandwagoners who haven't read a single academic or technical whitepaper on the technology, let alone the hundreds of them that have emerged which prove / annotate / express / clarify, in exhausting detail, all of the "fundamental problems" that Bitcoin's PoW protocol have, as well as far superior approaches that are in the process of being implemented.
But it's cute. You like Bitcoin. You're a good cheerleader.
I've actually read every single paper on Bitcoin, on Proof of Work, and on Proof of Stake I've ever found. I've been involved in Bitcoin since mid 2010. What is sad is that you wrote what you just did as if that dismisses me, or as if you are in any way authoritative on the subject. Your snide passive-aggressive writing is not cute. I am not a Bitcoin cheerleader, and I'd just prefer not talk to anyone about Bitcoin. It's been years since I have done so, I no longer go to conferences or even talk to family members about Bitcoin, and it's much the same way I quit telling people about linux maybe a decade ago. HFSP.
Sometimes you come across communities that look, from the outside, like a Disney theme park. You enter the gates and you're in a different reality. Everyday words have different meanings, and there are stories built up about their definitions, completely divorced from whatever happens in the outside world. Paid actors learn to complete this comprehensive alternate reality. But as you exit the gates, reality returns, and words reclaim their conventional meaning.
It's like that with Bitcoin fanatics.
"Money" and "currency" do have definitions built up over time by economists and financiers over the past centuries. They are not the same as is used, apparently, in the Bitcoin-Disney fantasy park.
Conventionally - and by conventionally, I mean as it is used by all economists and financiers for centuries - currency is a subset of money. A currency is the dollar, the Euro, the yuan. It doesn't have to be fiat, but today usually is. Money is any type of highly liquid asset typically used for the payment of debts, which includes currencies but can include short term bank notes as well. Although there have been times in history where gold was used as money, it is generally not used as money now, although like most assets it can be converted into money. Bitcoin can be money too, but it's a crappy money, for the reasons I described above. Generally, economists don't spend a lot of time splitting hairs about money and currency, because they're very similar concepts.
"Money" is not a synonym for "store of value." You will not find that in any economic textbook, or even Wikipedia for that matter.
Even if you wanted to use the fantasy park definition of money as anything with a store of value, you chose not to even defend Bitcoin as a store of value. Possibly because it's a terrible store of value.
Again: this is just Bitcoin. Crypto can be designed better. The fact that Bitcoin fanatics obsess over Bitcoin in particular is just proof that they're talking their book.
1. Bitcoin is environmentally damaging. It produces 37 megatons of CO2 per year and consumes 78 terawatt-hours of electricity annually. Much of that electric consumption is powered by coal. Not all energy consumption or CO2 output is bad, but value should be provided commensurately to society for the damage incurred. And yet:
2. It is a terrible currency. Promoters claimed we could pay for things with Bitcoin, that it'd replace fiat currency. But the design of Bitcoin in particular makes it an awful currency. To prevent deflation, a currency should be able to increase its supply to maintain reasonably constant velocity as demand increases for it as a medium of exchange. With its limited number of coins, Bitcoin cannot increase supply to maintain velocity: its only solution is to fractionalize, a form of deflation. And deflation is what we get. Massively: everything you own, and all your income, constantly becomes worth less expressed in Bitcoin, day after day.
3. It's a terrible currency, part two: currencies should have very low transaction costs. Bitcoin transaction costs exceed $20. The response to this is to recentralize it in the form of services that cheaply transact Bitcoin rights management through traditional databases. Eliminating the very value proposition of Bitcoin.
4. After having given up on defending it as a currency, the next claim is that it's a "store of value." But stores of value should have some degree of consistency of value: volatility is not a virtue. Bitcoin supporters are right that fiat currency, to the degree it is exposed to inflation, is at risk of not being the best store of value, which is why we don't normally keep huge amounts of resources piled up as cash. But Bitcoin is an awful store of value because it has no fundamental utility that moderates its price swings. Normal assets - real estate, bonds, gold - have some sort of fundamental utility or cash flow that helps to moderate price action over time. The asset must have some sort of use first, then it can become a good store of value. Because of the above flaws, Bitcoin has no good use, which thusly makes it a poor store of value.
None of this is a fundamental problem of crypto, just Bitcoin. Crypto could be very useful! But with many millionaires minted from a lucky speculation and their entire ego reliant on deceiving themselves that their speculation was clairvoyance, critiques of Bitcoin are invariably met with a flea market of intellectually mangy defenses that ultimately boil down to saying "well, look at its price!"