> Exceedingly few people actually use it for anything practical.
That is actually fairly common. Gold has been around for millennia, found basically 0 practical applications [0]. The value of something is roughly the marginal difficulty of procuring the thing by whether someone wants to own it, and at the moment nobody can create bitcoin for substantially less than $100k and broadly speaking people will always want to own them at some price.
That being said, I don't think bitcoin will hold its value long term. But the money question now is whether the collapse happens on the scale of years, decades, centuries or millenia.
[0] The purpose of gold jewellery is to demonstrate that someone has gold/the wealth to do something impractical; otherwise we could make plastic jewellery that is prettier, lighter and cheaper.
Gold was the universal medium of exchange for the vast majority of recorded human history. That also gives it a good track record of being a good store of value. This track record can't be said about Bitcoin which has only existed while the of the economy of the nation driving Bitcoin prices has been growing.
Plastic jewelry and other cheaper jewelry only really look good when it's new in a store. The main buyers of gold jewelry are Indians, who prefer higher karat gold, which looks good forever. The intersection between a non-reactive metal and a colorful metal make gold the ideal material for jewelry.
To bring that needle slightly off of 0, there's a long history of using gold in dentistry.
"Gold is suitable for dentistry because it is malleable, nearly immune to corrosion, and closely mimics the hardness of natural teeth, thereby causing no harm to natural teeth during chewing" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_teeth
That is actually fairly common. Gold has been around for millennia, found basically 0 practical applications [0]. The value of something is roughly the marginal difficulty of procuring the thing by whether someone wants to own it, and at the moment nobody can create bitcoin for substantially less than $100k and broadly speaking people will always want to own them at some price.
That being said, I don't think bitcoin will hold its value long term. But the money question now is whether the collapse happens on the scale of years, decades, centuries or millenia.
[0] The purpose of gold jewellery is to demonstrate that someone has gold/the wealth to do something impractical; otherwise we could make plastic jewellery that is prettier, lighter and cheaper.