Bitcoin or cash?” asks the bartender. 
 
 “ You want to know my opinion on bitcoin?” says the JPMorgan CEO. “ It’s empty.” 
The bartender replies “ I know, but tell me anyway.” 
 
 Every big run-up in bitcoin’s price prompts another debate about whether the oldest and largest cryptocurrency by request capitalization ($1.26 trillion, according to the rearmost CoinDesk data) is worth anything at all. Still, the likes of Dimon and other boomers are wrong when they say bitcoin is worth nothing. 
I've no idea where the price is headed (no bone knows, really), what the “ true” value is or whether it’s well below or well above current situations. (As always, do your own exploration and don't put in further than you go to lose.) All I know is that it’s lesser than zero, for the following reasons 
. 
 Suppression resistance 
 Bitcoin allows for the quick, unsure transmission of value without the need for a mediator. It's a way to distribute value (and data) among people without the meddling of governments or pots. 

 I could go on and on about why this is precious, as I've for times, but do n’t take my word for it. Ask WikiLeaks. Ask OnlyFans. Ask Meduza, the Russian news outlet that was ingrained a “ foreign agent” by the Kremlin and turned to bitcoin and other crypto donations to rainfall the performing megahit to its advertising business. 
 
 Simply put, bitcoin is suppression-resistant in an period of creeping fiscal suppression. 

 That's worth commodity. 
 
 Seizure resistance 
Bitcoin is delicate to expropriate. Not insolvable, but delicate. It requires the would- be confiscator to get ahold of the cryptographic private keys to a bitcoin portmanteau, which in turn requires the cooperation of the keyholder ( assuming the person has duly secured his or her keys). 
 
 That helps explain bitcoin’s appeal to people living under cathartic administrations, and indeed in the West there are edge cases where this quality could prove profitable – say-so, by precluding a prosecutor from unilaterally indurating all a defendant’s means before the person has been condemned of a crime (a practice that leaves the indicted unfit to pay for the counsel of their choice). 
I ’ve quoted Nathan Cook, now CTO of Zen Protocol Development, on this point ahead, but I ca n’t ameliorate on his awful passage from 2015, so then it's again 
. 
 An proprietor of bitcoin no longer has the problem faced by the proprietor of any other transmittable asset‘Will my property rights be admired?’ Holders of bitcoin enjoy it in virtue of material data independent of their social relations. The world may turn its reverse on bitcoin, yea, its value may fall to fragments of a cent, but those who enjoy it'll enjoy it anyhow. 
Bitcoin has a limited force and a predictable schedule of allocation6.25 BTC are booby-trapped every 10 twinkles, and that quantum is cut in half every four times or so and will continue to be halved until the force reaches a hair under 21 million units eventually in 2140, when we ’re all dead (except perhaps Peter Thiel, God bless him). After that, no further bitcoin will ever be created unless the algorithm in the software is changed by a agreement of the network, which is theoretically possible but exceedingly doubtful because it would go against the interests of enough important everyone involved ( miners, druggies, inventors). 
 
 As similar, some investors look at bitcoin as a barricade against affectation, a part traditionally played by gold. Arguably, bitcoin is indeed scarcer than gold because you noway know when someone’s going to dig up some candescent jewels from the ground or from an asteroid, whereas we know with near certainty how important bitcoin will live at any given time. 
The lazier critics like to point out that there are thousands of other cryptocurrencies with analogous characteristics as bitcoin, and claim this means the original isn't scarce at all. Anyone who tells you this has not done their schoolwork. 
 
 As a first transport, bitcoin has network goods on its side. It has far and above the loftiest hashrate, or position of calculating power devoted to securing the network, among those cryptos that use evidence-of- work, a medium by which actors agree on which set of records is true. For this reason, bitcoin at the network position is ( nearly) insolvable to hack (centralized exchanges are another story) and arguably the most secure coin in the most secure order. There are other agreement mechanisms, similar as evidence-of- stake, but none has been tested to the degree evidence-of- work has. 
That’s not to say other cryptos ca n’t have value, but there’s a reason bitcoin to this day still has the loftiest request capitalization among cryptos despite the proliferation of contenders, and it’s not just name recognition. 
 
 Long story short, if it’s not bitcoin it’s not bitcoin, and there will nearly clearly noway be further than just under 21 million of them.