bitcoincase.txt

Bitcoin, although not material, is valuable due to its utility and scarcity. It does not need to be protected by patent law because it is an open-source protocol that is meant to be shared freely, and is meant to be adopted as widely as possible. "Proprietorial protection" of Bitcoin by making it copyrighted intellectual property that is only available for a fee would greatly reduce its acceptance. Protocols are useful if they become widely adopted and standardized, similar to Ethernet, the internet, HTTP, TCP/IP, SMTP, etc.

Bitcoin is the first and most widely adopted protocol that allows value to be transferred directly peer-to-peer over the internet. Bitcoin is quickly becoming the Money over Internet Protocol. It will soon become a standard and indispensable part of the internet, similar to VoIP, SMTP, TCP/IP.

Fiat's fatal flaw is its requirement of using or relying on third parties, such as banks, the government, credit card companies, and payment processors. These third parties create unnecessary delays, charge unnecessary fees, create unnecessary uncertainty, restrict financial freedom, and are security loopholes as centralized targets for corruption/attack/exploitation/theft/hacking. The unreliable supply of fiat currency is also an issue, especially in countries experiencing hyperinflation such as Venezuela. The 21 million supply of bitcoin is an emergent property of the Bitcoin source code. It cannot be changed without producing a hard fork of the Bitcoin blockchain, which would create a new currency that isn't bitcoin... similar to "fool's gold." The many independent Bitcoin developers distributed around the world also own bitcoin and will not dilute their own bitcoin wealth by increasing the bitcoin supply. Such a supply increase would be antithetical to the tenants of bitcoin. As a bitcoin owner, I and virtually all other bitcoin owners would vote against the supply increase on Gitbub. The lack of consensus on the protocol change would either lead to the protocol change not getting implemented, or a hard fork into a new currency (e.g., similar to Bitcoin Cash). The free market would then decide which currency was the most useful and the most valuable. As you can tell, Bitcoin is deemed to be the most useful, most scarce, and most valuable cryptocurrency by the free market. This is evident by its market cap as well as the hashpower of the Bitcoin network. Bitcoin is actually anti-fragile, and the longer it remains the dominant cryptocurrency, the more likely it is to remain the dominant cryptocurrency. This is opposed to fiat currencies which are extremely fragile and can disappear due to imprudence of central banks and governments (e.g., Venezuela). Since Bitcoin is not owned by any particular nation/entity/corporation/government, but instead is open-source and can be used and modified by anyone, it is likely to exist for a very long time and evolve over time, similar to a language.

Something does not need to have a physical form to be valuable, just as Google and Facebook make the vast majority of their money from information and data which has no physical form. In fact, Bitcoin's lack of physical form is exactly one of the things that makes it so useful because it can be transported/sent at the speed of light in the form of information (photons and electrons). Bitcoin is assigned as digital gold by the free market, the collective wisdom of everyone recognizing its useful properties. Bitcoin doesn't have a centralized authority, and therefore there is no centralized individual/entity/group who assigns Bitcoin as anything. Bitcoin is money of the people, by the people, and for the people.

from: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BTC-USD/community?p=BTC-USD