There is no order in my opinion but all are true about the uses of Bitcoin in general, depending on each individual's point of view, their perspective on BTc itself.

Investing is different than trading which includes arbitraging.

Bitcoin is actually inflationary, not deflationary like many people think it is. The good thing from Bitcoin is its inflationary decreases with time,  and it can not be changed to be faster or slower by anyone. After 210,000 blocks, Bitcoin block subsidy will halve and it is coded in the Protocol.

How is the 21 million bitcoin cap defined and enforced


Bitcoin is Bitcoin and it does not need to be tokenized. There are tokenized Bitcoin tokens, Wrapped Bitcoin tokens but those tokens are not actual bitcoin.

If you want to own bitcoin, buy bitcoin. If you buy wrapped Bitcoin tokens, you don't have actual bitcoin and those tokens can lose in value if they fail to maintain their pegs to Bitcoin price.

94% of US adults have a bank account:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1386867/us-adults-with-bank-accounts/

I don't know what it is in other developed countries, but I suspect it's a similar number.

And I also suspect that easily 90% of the world's money is held in bank accounts, so the "don't have a bank account" market is an extreme niche.

And even more of a niche would be the intersection of, "has no bank account, but has consistent access to the Internet". We're talking a pretty small portion of the developed world here.


There is absolutely no asset known to mankind that does not have the ability to diminish in value. If somebody says they asset will never ever diminish in value, they are lying to you because they cannot possibly know that.

Every asset you hold is a speculation instrument, and could go either up or down in value as compared to other instruments.

Some instruments are very volatile, historically, and some are more stable. But there is no magic force making them stay that way. There is no asset that you can just leave there "without thinking about it", as much as people wish there was.

What can i say here, basing on current features and practical applications is that the use of Bitcoin can be reconfigured, definitely controversial if being the most common due to its popularity as a high-risk, high-reward asset and investing in Bitcoin to provide insights into value appreciation and arbitrage. Most people now recognize Bitcoin as a store of value, very much like "digital gold", where one holds it to preserve wealth from inflation. The next one is retail and services trade, where more and more merchants and websites selling goods started to adopt Bitcoin. Commercial contract payments, like regular fees and premiums, are less frequent in occurrence but still dominate. If there is a use case where Bitcoin shines, it would have to be in banking transfer of value and temporary storage of money. Asset tokenization is a new concept linking Bitcoin ownership to other assets and is possible but not widely adopted. In general, Bitcoin's speech in public discourse remains an inefficient tool for other use cases. This graph shows the current state of usage and prevalence of Bitcoin in the market.

It is true that everyone has different needs so they will use it according to their needs but you need to admit that most people use bitcoin as an investment more than any other use case . Right on this forum or other social networks...do you see how many threads talk about the use cases of bitcoin or do people mainly just discuss the price, volatility , and profitability of bitcoin? Or are you and your friend using bitcoin as an investment or do you just consider it a currency and don't care about its fluctuations?

Of course , you can both use bitcoin as an investment and turn it into a store of wealth, currency...you can combine but your priority is still investment , right? Bitcoin's volatility is a great gift so there's nothing wrong with people taking advantage of it to make a profit .

Speculative investment would be someone buying Bitcoin for the explicit purpose of trying to get more value out than they put in when they trade later on. A store of value usage would be if someone just wanted to preserve their wealth, so they buy Bitcoin with intent to trade for similar value without the intention of relative appreciation of Bitcoin relative to other assets. There is something fundamentally different about purchasing something to sell it for a higher price later on, as there is from purchasing something to sell it for an equal price later on.

It seems in this thread some people are claiming that speculation is not a type of investment at all, though I would disagree with that definition. I think speculating is a type of investment. However, I don't think that buying something to trade it for equal value later is investing... the idea of investment is growth. I would call that saving but not investing.

I've rarely seen someone showing such bad faith as that, to be honest. You're this kind of guy arguing for hours when he knows he's wrong I bet.
Do you know how many people represents 6% of the USA population exactly? That is to say 6% of 340 000 000 people? That's just 20.4 millions of americans. While it's one of the richest country in the world. So you can guess how many people are actually unbanked in poorer countries...
1.4 billions of adults around the world are unbanked according to the World Bank. That's what you dare to call an "extreme niche", sincerely?  
 

I'm sorry to say that, but it's the same kind of bad faith argument as above. Highly volatile and risky assets are well known, and Bitcoin is one of them, low-volatility and risk-free ones, and therefore safe for storing value, are well known too, gold is the most famous of them. You're very unlikely to lose any substantial portion of your initial investment at any time with those assets.

I don't understand why you're talking about markets now? The topic is about the "Utility Uses" of Bitcoin, not about how you could try to make money with Bitcoin. Besides that, Bitcoin doesn't belong to any company, it's a free, open-source and decentralized tool, the goal of Satoshi Nakamoto has obviously never been to try to make profits with it. Helping unbanked people, is maybe not what you care about the most, but Satoshi wanted to build something allowing to transact without the need of using banks.

Making a profit from Bitcoin is what perhaps 95% of Bitcoin users do with it today. This is not what Satoshi envisioned, but that's the reality of Bitcoin circa 2024.


No, he made Bitcoin for people who could not safely use a bank or other institution for fear of government prosecution or persecution. Surely most people who use Bitcoin--now, as well as in the beginning--already had some kind of bank account. They merely wanted to put... certain assets... out of the reach of their government, and/or wanted to be able to trade in such a way that could not be traced by their government.

If you wanted to make a developing world solution, it would be rather strange--especially 15 years ago--to create something that requires the internet and a computing device in order to use.

I'm not saying Bitcoin can't be used this way--it can, and is--but it wasn't made for that in mind anymore than it was made for what Bitcoin is mostly used for today e.g. an investment instrument.

Anyhow, the original point I was making in my OP (such that we can reel the conversation back on track here ), is that it's important not to look at what Bitcoin "can" do, but rather what can it do that nothing else can do. Bank cards etc. work well for much of the world's daily transactions, and Bitcoin was never intended to replace those transactions. Monero works correctly as a government-proof means of value transfer. Haypenny currencies are far faster and cheaper than credit cards. Bitcoin's only meme is "Bitcoin". Etc. etc.

We're trying to answer, "what can you use Bitcoin for", and... I think we're answering that, right?

Yeah, I don't think that there could be an order there, although if we go back to the roots o Bitcoin, as per whitepaper it was designed to be used as micropayment scheme. It's that it has evolved since it's inception, becoming an asset.

And it has grow even more, now one of the best if not the best asset in the world. People are obviously making money out of it, and we even have a country that legalized it (El Salvador). And it even proved itself as a hedge against financial and economic disaster like in the Covid-19 lockdown.