That's an excellent point. Though, you do realize the US dollar is the petrodollar?

How so?

There is no problem selling $250k of bitcoin these days. In the last 24 hours, $150 million dollars worth of bitcoin was traded on gdax. That's just one exchange. I could sell $250k of bitcoin right now on gdax and the price of bitcoin would go down less than a dollar. There is a lot of liquidity in the bitcoin market.

Joining slashdot 18+ years ago was all part of my master plan to scam people today. I'm impressed how you unraveled my plan. You know what, I know that I'm not a scammer. I don't understand why you are labeling people as scammers without any proof. My point was that I'm super grateful that I read that article about bitcoin on slashdot back in the day. It's kind of insane that wasting time on slashdot has paid off for me.

Now imagine if I had a beowolf cluster of gpu miners back in 2011.

Are you calling me a scammer? I've been on slashdot a lot longer than you have.

Back in 2011, Slashdot had a post about bitcoin. I thought it sounded interesting. So, I mined some and sent some money via dwolla to tradehill to mt.gox or something crazy like that and bought some. That $300 is now worth over $250k. I don't remember there being that many hater on the thread back then. If there were, I'm glad I didn't listen to them.

There are a number of exchanges where you can short it. https://www.bitmex.com/ is one of them.

A problem with wire transfers is that you need to share your account information. With that account information the other party can initiate a debit transfer. The debit transfer can be challenged within a certain amount of time.

An example of when that was a problem was when banks imposed a bank deposit levy in Cyrpus in 2012.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012%E2%80%9313_Cypriot_financial_crisis

Another example is when you sell something online and ship the item and the buyer used a stolen credit card or the buyer called their credit card company and asks for a chargeback.

Bitcoin is not a company or a sentient being so it's not trying to be anything. It's a platform for storing value and transferring value. How people use it is up to those people. Your question is like asking, Is the Internet trying to be a currency, or an investment scheme. Or is the internet trying to be a library, or a card catalog.

Bitcoin is a limited resource. Only 21 million bitcoins will ever exist. So, some people see that and think that there is a potential that a significant number of people(significant amount of value) will use it to transfer and to store value. If that happens, than the price of bitcoin will go up. So they buy some as an investment. It can also be used as a currency to transfer value. In some cases, the value of a bitcoin doesn't matter when it comes to transfer value. Let's say I want to buy a product listed at $100 USD on Overstock. I could buy a $100 worth of bitcoin and then purchases the item. Overstock than can immediately convert those bitcoins into $100 USD. The value of a bitcoin doesn't matter in this case. Even if it fluctuates wildly. You're probably think, "Great. Why won't I just use a credit card?". Great question. There are a number of answers to this. One use case, imagine I'm a US company and I ship worldwide. A customer wants to buy $5000 of product. I ship the product. They contact their credit card company and say it was a fraudulent charge and they issue a chargeback. My company is out of $5000 and there is not much recourse. Do you know of any payment options where the risk of chargeback is not present? The only one that I know is bitcoin(and other cryptocurrencies).

Does PayPal provide a service? If so, doesn't it reason that Bitcoin provides a service?

The two obvious services that bitcoin provides are the ability to transfer value and to store value. Venezuela's currency is experiencing hyper inflation. If I lived in that country, I would be trying to convert from holding value in that currency to something else.

It wasn't designed to do any of those things. The problem that Bitcoin was designed to solve was how to transfer value without needing to rely on a central authority. The most common central authority for transferring of value is a bank.