> many use Bitcoin to escape the effects of fiscal and monetary policy that they don't agree with (e.g. 35% of all dollars that have ever existed, were printed this year).

The point I was trying to make is that Bitcoin will never replace a national currency, nor will Bitcoin ever get to the point where it accounts for any meaningful volume of payments for goods/services. No nation will let that happen because (agree with it or not), not having monetary policy controls will (not maybe) result in an unstable economy which is in no one's best interest.

I'm not beyond convincing, but I need you to explain how you imagine a simple deflationary scenario playing out. Here it is. The govt. was asleep at the wheel, classifies bitcoin as a foreign currency and we transition over to bitcoin. The federal reserve has no teeth. Then, for whatever chaos theory reason, deflation begins to kick in. Every-day-Joe sees costs of goods decreasing relative to Bitcoin's purchasing power. Saving coin suddenly starts looking like an appealing investment strategy and he stops spending. Demand dries up bit by bit and goods get even cheaper in a positive feedback loop. What do you do?

We really do want to keep inflation at around 2-4% for a reason. How do you achieve that with Bitcoin is in wide-spread use?

> The law is always slow to catch up with innovation. It's a commodity for now, which makes using it more burdensome than it needs to be, but this can change overnight if it was given the status of a currency.

Why do you assume that the law got this wrong? Again, the reason for this is because it's not in our national best interest to have a wide-spread alternative currency to the USD. I think the IRS absolutely classified this correctly.

The vast majority of Bitcoin purchasers do so with the desire to make USD, e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7g9cmx/we_made_it_.... Typical bitcoin holders watch the market rate because even if they don't realize it, they all actually know it's not a currency in anything but name.

> Bitcoin is the opposite of anonymous. I'm not sure why people still get this wrong after seeing Bitcoin in use for 11 years. It is a well tracked public ledger of value. Companies can more easily open their books to audits, and the IRS can also verify these books using publicly obtainable information.

Personal identity isn't attached to wallets. It can be, but that's not within the scope of the idea of Bitcoin itself. Blockchain as a ledger has useful application for accounting purposes, but Bitcoin itself isn't a value add.

> Bitcoin is digital gold. Its intrinsic value stems from many aspects (in no particular order):

'Digital gold' is very different from real gold in that, well, it's not real and can't be used to produce anything physical. Real gold is an input to manufacturing value chains.

* ease of value transfer
* time of settlement (settlement between banks will take up to 90days)
* divisibility (a dollar only has two decimal points, while Bitcoin has 12 for now, but no real limit otherwise)
* a zero-trust consensus system
* and quite a few other properties. These are all intrinsic to Bitcoin. To claim that it has no value flies in the face of its pratical application for the last 11 years.

Not to be flippant, by why does anyone care about any of those bullets? Most people just want money to be stable so they know when they can retire and not worry about the purchasing power of their savings. And they want their money in banks so they can be FDIC insured.

Here's a perspective on intrinsic value. When a person sells a house for a significant capital gain. They don't just exit the housing market. They still need to live somewhere and they reinvest at least a portion (or sometimes more) capital back into the housing market.

So yes, you can talk about whether something has intrinsic value in if it holds value but that's really missing the point in a significant way.

* National currency has value because it enables stable commerce
* Commodities have value because they are used by humans
* Bitcoin is classified as a commodity but has no intrinsic value

> Not sure why you feel this is true. Bitcoin would continue fine as-is with the current participants and activity

Maybe. Some people are going to sell their bitcoin and retire taking that money out of the system, most likely permanently. A bunch of people crowd funded that. So how does the next inline "get rich off of bitcoin"? I think it's pretty straightforward.