Jeff, here is my take:
-- Your various investment thesis ideas for Bitcoin are all true, but they are true of crypto in general and clearly not true of block chain in particular. e.g. alone it will never be the basis of a transaction network.
I predict that decades from now some non-proof of work coin will indeed have greater price stability than Gold. This will only happen once there are more pots of wealth whose owners believe in the coin as a store of value. Essentially one can determine the non-speculative price for that coin by dividing the total value (in USD) that holder want to hold by the number of tradable coins.
But clearly the speculative value of BTC is much larger than its asset value presently, so its price is and will be much more volatile than gold, for many years.
THE REMAINING INVESTMENT THESIS
(Here is my idea)
--AS A DIGITAL ASSET--
The recent melt-down of TerraUSD shows us the counter-party risk tying to some off chain asset like USD. I think we will grow better third party mechanism, still having the asset off chain (like gold) will ALWAYS introduce a risk for some on-chain contract.
But a digital asset like a coin is different, it *CAN* be tied to a transaction w/o any counter party risk. Just like gold you will still have an asset class risk, but at least you will not have a custodial risk too.
Thus I think the world of DeFI will be run on these digital assets. And because (unlike Gold) these digital assets are able to operate w/o counter party risk, they will (over a length of time) become the preferred investment asset class.
But I am not certain this will be BTC.
Right now wrapped BTC is better than wrapped gold in the sense that one can digitally inspect the custodial wBTC accounts, but one cannot digitally inspect the wGOLD accounts. But I suspect we can do better.
I bet one day we will have a chain that does not require a third party custodian... it will be a smart contract. but either way, it need not be BTC.
So that settles it. our last hope for an investment thesis has failed for BTC.
.... but not quite.... already now, I see real resistance to any new asset class coin being created from thin air. Existing holders will only accept the new coin if they can exchange their coin for the new coin. So I give it some chance that at least some existing coins have a pathway into the new currency.
But maybe not a large chance.
So I guess BTC is really just a speculative holding. (this is spoken as a guy who owns some, and who is pro-crypto)
