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.

Mod FP funny in the theory-practice joke genre.

However the context appears to be America, where the idea of solutions via (significant or complicated) change has become its own joke category. I still like (too much) to fantasize about solution approaches, but I'm increasingly convinced that the USA has passed the point of recovery via less violent evolutionary improvements. The "American way" into the future has been lost and it appears that only revolutionary change is possible now. I have two personal problems with revolutions. One is the extra deaths. I actually think that may be a key attribute to recognize a real revolution. The other is the uncertainty of the outcome. In some cases a revolution can produce positive improvements, but there's no guarantee that the new conditions won't be worse than the conditions that created the revolution.

They might even believe they're doing good. Politics is a magnet for those kinds of people. C suite too, sometimes, if the company is on solid enough financial footing that morons up top can coast along.

I don't think alcohol is required, but the better of the only two Funny on the story that had large potential for humor.

I am beginning to think the entire AI topic is a joke. Side effect of trying to read What is Thought? by Baum? Or aftereffect of A Thousand Brains by Hawkins. We have no idea how intelligence works, but "borrowing" LOTS of "intelligent" artifacts has become the default starting point?

Me? My new ambition is to become an expert in asking questions that drive AIs crazy. Yes, I'm claiming partial credit for driving Gemini nuts. But it's probably just a personal problem because (optimistically?) the google has put me on a special enemies list to receive worthless answers.

Ballots? No. Just do it.

At least not if they were wearing AI glasses imposing VR advertising for next month's improved AI glasses.

Obligatory joke for low hanging fruit.

Adam Smith's biggest mistake was stealing the invisible hand's cloak of invisibility. Mostly downhill since then, now at AI-enhanced speeds.

This morning's weird thought was that Adam Smith's great mistake was to make the invisible hand visible. It was a flawed idea in the first place, basically a claim that things would work out "for the best" without knowing the details, but it was really a justification for social Darwinism before Darwin. In a sense bankruptcy serves as the equivalent of death in evolutionary systems in the biological world.

Once the invisible hand had lost its cloak of invisibility all the scoundrels in the world leapt to the attack, and we eventually wound up with bigger and bigger messes. The controlling hands are still mostly invisible, and now enhanced with AI, but they are still (for now) human hands busily devising new scams for fresh suckers. Leading candidates for the worst actors? My latest list features advertisers, stock brokers, real estate agents, and politicians. (Stock brokers is probably too narrow, but bankers is too broad and FinTech Bros is too trendy (for my tastes).)

Needs a joke for the conclusion, but I'm out of humor these days. Everything keeps running into the "We can't get there from here" oldie.

If you do, it isn't harm. It's curating the gene pool.

When the tsar fell, everyone lost their jobs except the prison guards.

Europe never understood freedom, egalitarianism, meritocracy, or government by consent of the governed. They aped it. Imperfectly.

Funny, but the Apple approach would be "Vintage Windows 10".

My cue? My latest AI project had a punch card phase. At one point the entire thing was on Hollerith cards, with the program in PL/C (a dialect of PL/I) and about a thousand cards of data. It had originally been a simple typewritten list derived from a handwritten list. Also in the early 80s it became a database for the first time, ported to bigger and better computers and operating systems later... Probably late in the 90s it got a PERL/CGI front end interface (ultimately based on some code the late James Liu gave me around 1995 before he moved to Sun). Most of the stuff after that was statistical utilities, most recently using JavaScript (which I sometimes write in a style that looks like Fortran).

The Claude project version involved a number of short chat discussions of features and data structures. The actual coding phase would take Claude about two minutes and then I needed a minute or two (depending on which modules had been updated) to install the code. Testing was more variable. Not systematic, but I have quite a bit of familiarity with the problems I've encountered over the years. Around ten of those sessions and the code had all the features of the PERL that took me a long time to write... Even more interesting was that the PERL system had an interesting bug in one of the regex calls, but the new system doesn't have it. (I spent quite a bit of time trying to can that bug, but Claude just avoided it completely.)

Or should I blame LinkedIn? Anyway, when I submitted the story it included a link to the summary on LinkedIn, but I don't see any trace here. The LinkedIn version was a short summary of four advanced Chinese AI models released in the same week. Mostly I remember a few details about the one for generating videos, but LinkedIn didn't say anything substantial about why they were free, at least as the current monetary terms appear.

So when I checked here and noticed the link was missing I went back to LinkedIn to get the link again, but LinkedIn has infinite scroll in both directions and I wasn't able to find it again. Which motivated a google websearch that failed badly (as so many of them do these days) which drove me to Bing, which actually produced some interesting results, though none of them seemed to match up with the original version from the LinkedIn source. https://news.cgtn.com/news/202... is one that seems to cover most of the same territory, but at a much lower level.

I think you should start your own research with the meaning of the word joke. Perhaps starting from the etymology?

No substantive comment on your "reply" because I saw no substance there. Blinded by the rudeness?

My next joke perhaps should be about creeping senility among low-digit IDs on Slashdot. Not all jokes are funny ha-ha. Maybe it's just an attitude problem in your case, but I'd be a fine one to talk about negative attitude. (Currently contemplating a most evil business contest. My initial list of candidates includes advertising, real estate, stock markets, and politics.)

No no no. You need six years of environmental impact statements (per foot if pipeline) while tanker trucks keep driving the stuff on local roadways. Think of the children!