If you are new to Bitcoin and wondering why it's so valuable, please read this:
Bitcoin’s value derives from its current real uses (mainly for money transfers and remittances) its limited supply and scarcity (store of value) and its many potential uses. Also, behind the curtains there is a huge growth in the bitcoin ecosystem development that a regular folk can't see because it's ignored by the media.
If you buy for day trading you may lose money, but if you hold long term, it has been proven you get nice ROI. And bitcoin has barely started, think of the Internet/email in the 90's. A decentralized technology that has a valuable use it's not going to disappear, even if a few tyrannical governments try to "ban" it.
Check out this great articles:
What Gave Bitcoin Its Value?
https://fee.org/articles/what-gave-bitcoin-its-value/ "How do Bitcoins have value?"
https://www.quora.com/How-do-Bitcoins-have-value/answer/David-Strayhorn
Bitcoin is a worldwide-distributed decentralized peer-to-peer censorship-resistant trustless and permissionless deflationary system/currency (see Blockchain technology) backed by mathematics, open source code, cryptography and the most powerful and secure decentralized computational network on the planet, orders of magnitude more powerful than Google and government combined. There is a limit of 21 million bitcoins (divisible into smaller units). "Backed by Government" money is not backed by anything and is infinitely printed at will by Central Banks. Bitcoin is limited and decentralized.
Receive and transfer money, from cents (micropayments) to thousands:
Very cheap regardless of amount $$$ sent (with new apps coming) Borderless (no country can stop it from going in/out or confiscate) Trustless (nobody needs to trust anybody for it to work) Privacy (no need to expose personal information) Securely (encrypted cryptographically and can’t be confiscated) Permissionless (no approval from central powers needed) Instantly (from seconds to a few minutes) Open source (auditable by anybody) Worldwide distributed (from anywhere to anywhere on the planet) Censorship resistant (no government can stop its use) Peer-to-peer (no intermediaries with a cut) Portable (easier to carry/move than cash, gold and silver) Public ledger (transparent, seen by everybody) Scalable (each bitcoin is divisible down to 8 decimals) Decentralized (distributed with no single point of failure) Deflationary (its supply goes down with time until reaching 21 million ever) Immutable global registry (can’t be altered/hacked by nobody) No chargebacks-No fraud ('push' vs' 'pull' transactions).
And that’s just as currency, Bitcoin has many more uses and applications.
permalinkembedsavereportgive goldreply[–]lifelongAFC 0 points1 point2 points 15 minutes ago (0 children)I continue to hear "Bitcoin has many more uses and applications" but have never understood that. Can someone eli5 how to use it outside of an investment or currency?