- Few commentators speak of bitcoin's utility, and the biggest bulls say the plan is to never sell.
- Not long ago, much of the rhetoric focused on decentralized finance and bitcoin as a payment.
These days, if you listen to bitcoin's most prominent investors, little of what you hear will touch on the real-world utility of the world's largest cryptocurrency.
It wasn't long ago that enthusiasts insisted bitcoin would have a myriad of use cases that would establish it as an alternative to the legacy financial system. They touted the potential for cross-border payments, decentralized finance, and blockchain technology.
All that is largely absent from today's rhetoric. The bull thesis in 2024 is simple: supply will fall short of demand. There's almost no discussion taking place about bitcoin's value being derived from anything other than its use as an investment vehicle.
Some of the most prominent bulls including MicroStrategy's Michael Saylor and SkyBridge Capital's Anthony Scaramucci have indicated the plan is simply to hold bitcoin forever.
Speaking at the Bitcoin Investor Day conference in New York on March 22, Scaramucci said he advises his clients to "do nothing" with their bitcoin.
"The dead people at Charles Schwab do far better than the living people," Scaramucci said. "So act like you're dead with your bitcoin and don't sell your bitcoin. Don't do anything with it."
Saylor, whose firm owns 1% of all bitcoin in circulation, has similarly said his intention is to snap up as much bitcoin as possible and keep it forever.
"We think bitcoin is the highest form of property, the apex property in the world, and it's the best investment asset," Saylor said in a recent interview with Yahoo Finance. "So the endgame is to acquire more bitcoin. Whoever gets the most bitcoin wins. There is no other endgame."
Speculating on sentiment
Skeptics have questioned bitcoin's utility since its inception.
Even as an inflation hedge, the token hasn't shown much promise. It lost 60% of its value in 2022 when the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates to tame the worst bout of inflation since the 1970s.
And as a form of payment, there's hardly any mainstream use being recorded today. A CoinDesk report said bitcoin's blockchain has recorded minimal on-chain transfer volume, indicating no one is doing anything but holding.
"I sympathize with how much some investors struggle with the appeal of bitcoin," William Quigley, the cofounder of the stablecoin Tether, told Business Insider.
Bitcoin, he said, is slow and expensive to use for transactions, and there are stronger alternatives as far as consumer payment systems. Bullishness aside, it ultimately hasn't caught on as a popular choice for everyday transactions.
"The most common critique I hear is it has no utility, that it's a paperweight," Quigley said. "For the most part, I say, 'guilty as charged on all counts.' But none of that matters to me."
For Quigley, the reason investors want to trade bitcoin isn't much different from the reason they would want to trade something like a futures contract. The point of trading bitcoin, he said, is to trade on sentiment and capture profits in price discrepancies.
"Crypto is dominated by people speculating on changes in sentiment," the Tether cofounder said. "The utility of bitcoin from a trader standpoint is to try to make money on sentiment."
Price appreciation is the top use case
At the Friday conference, while some individuals floated the idea of bitcoin as a hedge against inflation or runaway government debt, there was little chatter about its utility beyond being an investment.
Alex Konanykhin, the CEO of Unicoin, said bitcoin at one point was a "tremendous" innovation in the long evolution of money, as it put the blockchain on the map. But in his view, being a first-mover doesn't mean it won't be dethroned.
"My point is not that it's worthless, but it's become antiquated in the 15 years of its existence," Konanykhin told Business Insider.
To be fair, it's not surprising why the investment thesis has eclipsed any discussion of real-world use cases.
The coin is up 150% over the last year and 58% in 2024. After the SEC approved 11 spot bitcoin ETFs in January, demand soared and experts say mainstream adoption appears irreversible.
Paired with robust ETF-fueled demand, this year's halving event and supply shock will further support bitcoin's long-term price outlook and overshadow any talk of utility.
"What's the utility?" Quigley said. "Critiques may not be that relevant if you're looking at it as an investor."