Bitcoin is worth whatever the market says it's worth. But it does have some features that are very hard to replicate.

1. Security: The solid technical and game-theoretic basis means that even a nation state working for years to accumulate hash power and energy production would need to spend something like $200B to wrestle control of the network from the native miners and nodes. It would also be unlikely to last due to difficulty adjustments. At best, you could hope to temporarily undermine confidence in the network by spending 10's of billions. Quantum resistance is technically achievable today and the upgrade is feasible before quantum attacks are practical.
2. Speed/cost: You can securely execute large transactions in less than an hour. No other network or physical commodity can offer this level of fungibility, security and speed. The transaction cost is negligible for meaningful value transfers. You cannot get the same level of assurance and speed with fiat networks such as SWIFT. You increasingly run the risk of political exclusion on dollar networks (Russia, Iran, N. Korea, and political dissidents are all well-aware that their dollar bank balances can be useless or forfeit at any moment; many people are taking note both inside and outside the USA). The cost and speed of transaction with commodities like gold is very high and very slow. You might have to cross an ocean with a battleship or a fighter escort on 747 to properly secure a $2B transaction in gold. You CAN choose to trust intermediaries such as gold banking networks (ex COMEX). These have already begun to show cracks in their ability to deliver during times of peak demand, but they are also subject to political risk. Moving stacks of physical dollars is about as cumbersome as moving gold.
3. Sovereignty: you can control a vast amount of value by just memorizing 12 seed words.
4. Network effect: no other blockchain has the reach of Bitcoin. No other crypto network has as much value. This is a major incentive to continue to cooperatively upgrade and collectively invest in securing that value.
5. Strictly limited supply.

You can argue any of these points but in reality it is extremely hard to engage in practical attacks against them. As other monetary networks evolve, they will continue to expose their relative weaknesses vis-a-vis Bitcoin. Dollars are the strongest fiat, useful for many transactions, but they continually inflate away value. Gold inflates slower but also has a worse security and transferability profile. Other cryptos trade minor features for major drawbacks. Any truly useful feature adopted by other chains can be integrated into Bitcoin or sidechains in a conservative but inevitable timeline because there is more incentive to upgrade than to adopt a smaller, less proven network.

The longer that Bitcoin persists with these features and as it becomes more widely useful for smaller transactions, and especially as fiat currencies inevitably fail, the proposition of storing value in Bitcoin will become evident to a larger number of people. Because it has no intrinsic value (btw, just like dollars, yen, yuan, etc) Bitcoin exchange rates will swing widely until a plurality of people (and agents) adopt it for savings. That will naturally raise the exchange rate (price) and diminish the swings. We are already seeing the beginnings of this with the price action in the last few years continuing to be dramatic, but much less so than in earlier years. As volatility continues to decline, Bitcoin will become more useful for shorter-duration savings and smaller transaction values, continuing to accrete size and value to the network.

In other words, the intrinsic value of Bitcoin does not matter, just as it does not matter for fiat. The properties of Bitcoin DO matter. If those properties all continue to hold, the shift of usage and expansion of the network will continue. It will increase in value over time simply because more people value it.

I could be missing something and look forward to responses that might expose the holes in my argument.

If you want taxes that high, you don't build AI satellites in space, you don't complete Starship, you don't build moon bases and we don't get humanity to Mars, apart from some rovers, flags and footprints.

We also completely cede the technology and industrial competition on Earth to China.

You either reward excellence and risk-taking or you don't.

We managed to build roads, railroads, bridges, canals, and an entire industrial revolution without an income tax. If you really understand history, it's clear that most of the 20th century was about squeezing the cultural, economic, and political energy out of the United States for the benefit of the people running big political machines. They have siphoned off almost every ounce of excess capacity in our society for their own ends. You can't fix a society being destroyed from the top down by putting more power in the hands to the parasite class.

Musk built an empire big enough to contend with those guys and he's made mistakes, and committed sins just like the rest of us. There's plenty of examples of states that confiscate all the wealth. It always kills people en mass.

Consider that fixing things involves more freedom and more open markets instead of fewer.

Funny enough, SpaceX put out a long prospectus explaining exactly what they intend to do with the money and Elon has been making the rounds talking about it endlessly: complete Starship development, build and launch AI satellites, build the worlds largest, most advanced Fabs in Texas to supply chips for cars, satellites and robots that will deliver transportation, labor and intelligence services in high demand. And, by the way, colonize the moon. You don't have to like Elon but it's a strange fantasy to believe he's just going to take all of that "wealth" and squander it on stuff that doesn't make anyone's life better.

I remember a time when Slashdot used to get excited about pushing the bounds of tech and engineering to tackle big problems.

It's demonic forces corrupting your cheerios. News at 11.

Zuck is really inspiring and having his AI shadow will rally the troops. I wonder if he also speaks parceltongue.

Can he avoid trial by reason of insanity or is that just something reserved for repeat offenders who kill random white girls on the subway?

Interesting. What do you think his big trick is? Why are his companies successful?

You can disrupt GPS to slow down establishing a connection. You can slow down the link with lots of local ground-generated RF noise. You can fly drones or planes that discover terminals and jam them. There's no such thing as an unjamable radio. However, with 10-20 starlink satellites "visible" in the sky at any given time and the average time overhead being less than 10 minutes, a terminal should be able to find a clear line of sight intermittently.

A skilled jamming operation would use drones to discover terminal locations by listening for transmissions and just physically attack them. At that point it becomes a numbers game and an arms race.

Bottom line: insurgency has low bandwidth requirements. Iran can probably disable 80 to 90% of Starlink traffic but the last 10% is more than enough to coordinate against the regime.

Said no one, ever.

It's easy to criticize, harder to execute.

There's no reason they can't actually convert everything in a month except a lack of will.

Maybe the US should colonize it.

No. Not really. But seriously, the people running that place are deeply evil. Arresting children for *reading* social media posts. Arresting people for quietly reading the Bible in public. Arresting people for defending themselves from gang violence. Forced digital ID? Draconian capital controls. Security cameras on every corner. Attempting to repeal Brexit against the will of the people.

On the other hand, they haven't started killing populist politicians en mass like Germany. Yet.

labrador's law: Only agitated dogs bother barking

The average post online gets something like 1000x more views than comments or replies. A post generally has to pass the viewer's threshold of emotional response to elicit the effort of a reply. Therefore, the responder either has a personal connection with the author or subject or feels strongly about it, and as such, the response is much more likely to be polarized, given the rarity of passionate moderation. This is a key contributing factor to online polarization: the majority does not feel as strongly about most issues as the people writing articles or posts about the issues. However, over time, saturation of the online media landscape with polarized posts and replies gives the illusion of higher polarization, which probably leads people to feel and believe that the issues themselves are polarizing and that most people ARE polarized on the issues.

Because we generally take sides in politics based on social acceptance rather than individual evaluation of the issues, the discussion becomes even less rational. If my social group is almost completely party-aligned, I will be much more likely to simply accept and promote the 11th-ranked plank of my party's platform than to depart from it, risking social isolation unless I deeply care about that particular issue.

This is why the most important issues are never the leading planks of a party's platform, but the most devisive issues ARE the leading ones, even if they are sometimes the least important, because that's how you gather support. Consider issues like abortion, racism and non-traditional sexuality. None of these issues affect more than 25% of people directly, yet they are hot-topic issues that drive emotional support of political parties.

Free: look to ADP, Indeed, LinkedIn and similar sources. Wall Street gets data out of the largest employers regularly because they have special relationships.

Everyone who makes actual economic decisions based on this kind of data have long-ago abandoned confidence in government reporting. It's politicized and it's been systematically sweetened to preserve the illusion of low inflation and higher employment for decades. The fact that people don't want to answer questions may have as much to do with distrust of government as anything else. Why waste your time?

Consider the counterfactual. If it was the Swedish government from the 1990s asking you to answer questions, you'd probably take it seriously because it would credibly inform responsive policy.

BLS stats are mostly just headline generators for the propaganda machine.