Yeah, the store of value idea is pretty abstract and most people are completely unfamiliar with the various functional aspects that make money in general a store of value, or, rather, a lack of store of value, given the pervasive practice of currency inflation practiced by every central bank.

People can wrap their heads around there being "value" in an "asset" because it has "revenue streams" associated with it- that's what property and being a landlord is about. You can charge rent, so your property has value. That is very familiar because everyone either owns property or rents property. And then they look at BTC and are like- there are no revenue streams, any "value" is just made up.

Gold, a scarce/low supply inflation asset, and former money, is a good mental model for BTC, but it is completely unfamiliar to most folks, and not even the notion of metal coin being intrinsically valuable applies in any economy any more. In fact if anyone thinks about gold, they probably think people who put value into it are deluded.

People also can understand different currencies having different relative values, some being stronger, some being weaker. Why that is is generally a complete mystery. People think of strong currencies coming from "strong" countries with "strong" economies and weak currencies coming from "weak" countries with "weak" economies, where strong and weak roughly correspond to military capability and economic industrial capacity and diversity.

There is some truth in that mental model, but since BTC is not really "used' as a currency, it doesn't get to be slotted in to the currency mental map.

The actual function that BTC is starting to serve and that is critical to the functioning of all modern economic entities, whether governments or private enterprises, the notion of a "financial settlement layer", is completely unfamiliar. So yeah. It is hard to get traction when the machine is mysterious, to abuse a metaphor a bit.

The unnecessary energy waste argument though is an interesting one, eg where BTC is wasteful like just running your A/C unnecessarily or whatever. The most relevant comparison is looking at something called "home idle load" which in the US is basically the background appliance energy use. BTC total electricity use is in fact a tiny fraction of home idle load, which people don't really get exercised about and many when buying new appliances pay little or no attention to.

If one doesn't see the purpose for the use of BTC energy- which again is an unfamiliar concept of the need for "security" for a system of record- people do see the purpose for the wasted home load energy. They need home appliances, they just wish they were more efficient. That BTC mining becoming more efficient would not result in the network using less energy, in fact, the opposite would occur- this is also strange.

Anyway- I agree with you, it is a set of completely novel concepts that interoperate in ways that are very different from existing related and familiar mental models.

That is why to my mind the only way "in" to arriving at an understanding is to look at money- all moneys- as technology, as technical machines that are different implementations of accounting rules.

BTC is a "store of value" "secured" by burning energy because it is an asset system of record, a ledger, that uniquely for the first time in human history cannot be changed either directly or indirectly (e.g. by inflation) by a political actor who "governs" it. The "value" of a BTC is mathematically related to the cost of energy, and to the demand for use of that sort of ledger. What we have seen is that there is significant and growing demand for this sort of ledger, a ledger that is independent of the political processes that exist in every government, and were some problem with BTC itself to emerge, there are now different implementations of the idea that this demand would shift onto. But most of the brains that have the capacity to study and find such problems in BTC's implementation have done so and have not yet found them, so its value is really as the best known solution to a problem that we didn't know we had, and now we do.

Not sure if that makes sense. Thanks for the engagement.