Many of these same arguments apply to gold. Do you think gold is (mostly) useless today? If yes, when did it stop becoming useful? Do you think it was always useless?
Probably true. On another note, I see Impervious.ai in your post history. I've never been able to wrap my head around what they're building. If you're willing, I'd love if you could point me to any good learning resources.
You are correct that bitcoin is heavily dependent on miners. That said, I don't think you can simply "take away the Bitcoin miners". An excellent example of this is China's recent ban on bitcoin mining, which quickly dropped the network hash rate by >50%. Today, only a few months later, the hash rate has returned[1], and those miners are back online on the other side of the world. Don't underestimate the power of incentives.
I understand your concern over the lack of "intrinsic value" in the sense that it is not a productive asset generating economic value (like a business). That said, I'd really encourage you to consider that monetary value is real. I don't necessarily recommend investing in it, but there's a reason humans have valued gold for so long.
> Nevertheless, investing in gold at the current price seems unwise, since its price is many times its "natural" price as commodity and so it is more likely to go down than up.
This is a misconception and a fundamental misunderstanding of gold's primary utility for thousands of years.
While it is true that gold's price reflects a significant premium beyond the "natural" market price, this has been the case for millennia. Since ancient times, most demand for gold has not been for industrial uses or jewelry, but rather as a store of a value. This results in gold having a "monetary premium".
It's also worth mentioning that it is no coincidence that humans happened to chose gold as money. Among all chemical elements, gold has a favorable combination of chemical properties and rarity in the earth's crust that make it a suitable choice for storing value over long periods of time. In fact, nearly all gold mined in human history is still around today. We've been hoarding it since the time of the pharaohs.
I'm sympathetic to crypto skepticism, but I'm afraid many people are missing the forest for the trees. I'm curious for those that still truly believe Bitcoin is a ponzi scheme or a bubble - at what price point and time would you start to consider that you may be tragically wrong?
Really cool. I've seen a lot of handwritten letter writing services, but most lack realistic variations. It's a pretty crowded market, but this definitely has potential as a spin-off service.