From an investment perspective, bitcoin does not have a significant advantage as a store of value as you would think. Its expenditures are in energy+equiment hash rate, which is going up at the rate of value being put in. and its profits are based on transaction costs, which are also going up in tandem with the value put in.
Take away the speculation and you'll have a zero-sum game which always leverages power costs trough transaction processing. So the store of value is a benchmark of computational energy.
index funds will have better track records than bitcoin, even if all index funds drop 50% tommorrow.
Bitcoin is a negative sum game. In an ideal world without a supply shortage of mining hardware and without regulations the Bitcoin price would match the production costs of a block. Next to all profits then go to electricity providers, thus leaving the game.
don’t the incentives drive miners to cheaper sources of energy? how does that non linear variable factor into your zero sum argument?
re speculation— I don’t think you can remove it from the equation. Equities are highly speculative. The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. I can’t count the number of times positive earning reports are expressed in negative movements.
If your source of energy gets cheaper, you would capitalise on that by increasing your hash rate in order to get an advantage in the hash checksum lottery. The profitability of bitcoin mining has always been your hashrate/cost, and your cost has always been the total cost of ownership of your equipment. That includes power.
Speculation would be fine if it helped price discovery but it has become clear to me that bitcoin is far too irrational for me to partake in other than keeping the little exposure that I've had so far. I'm sure there is some mathematical hash algorithm/proof of stake/distributed accounting that could serve a better job as a financial tool than relying on government-issued currency with a high risk of inflation as a result of poor debt management. But no crypto can satisfy all factors that investors would like.
* Decrease in transaction costs as the new protocol matures
This is historically what happened as technology, computing power, bandwidth improved. Bitcoin would require changes in protocol in order to make this happen, like Ethereum did.
* significantly better balance between early investors and late investors. A million increase in value between early and late investors just destroys the store of value idea as its a pure speculation instrument. A currency with a very stable inflation rate could outperform the dollar if enough markets used it.
* better integration with long-standing agreements like insurance against theft, loss, recalls and other tools everyone expects to be able to use from a functioning society.
Take away the speculation and you'll have a zero-sum game which always leverages power costs trough transaction processing. So the store of value is a benchmark of computational energy.
index funds will have better track records than bitcoin, even if all index funds drop 50% tommorrow.