Greentext

In the early days, the Bitcoin community was very ideological (and I guess a lot of it still is). Libertarian, Mises Institute, Ayn Rand, abolish the Fed types. People actively willed-it into having value (e.g. setting up a pizza delivery for 10,000 BTC). It's specifically designed to be "digital gold," where the amount that can be mined decays logarithmically over time, so supply is effectively constrained (very much so now), and the more people that want to buy it, the more it's worth, because that means you need to find people willing to sell it at a particular price. If you were to think of it as a currency, it would be a disinflationary currency, or effectively deflationary (because coins get "lost"). This gave and gives people that hold Bitcoin financial incentive to proselytize Bitcoin so their holdings are worth more. Overall, it's a pretty stupid idea, IMO, and the crypto space is full of mostly scammers and grifters now. A deflationary currency is a really bad idea under capitalism, since it encourages people to just hoard the currency instead of loaning it out, investing in new businesses, etc. Gold is also a horrible currency, which is why no country uses it as such, or even backs its own currency with gold anymore.