The entire thing with bitcoin is to create scarcity. Scarcity is the thing they believe will drive higher prices long term.
Full disclosure, I own bitcoin.
With that said, I am fully aware there is zero underlying assets supporting bitcoin. It's all a belief in something.
One thing about a currency is it must be transferable in many different denominations. For example, $1,10, 100 etc. Currency must easy to scale to support buying anything from $1.00 to $1,000 conveniently. Will bitcoin have this, Nope. WIll someone really use bitcoin as the preferred money to buy my bike for sale for .6258 bitcoin? Nope. It's not a easily transferable currency, unless both parties have the technical ability to make it work, which is new for this world, a technical component to buy and sell. Also, the value changes so fast that one must look up what the value is constanly to figure out what they have. For these resons, it will never be a currency.
It's a speculative investment that has no intrinsic value. Never forget this.
I am hoping when I want to sell my bitcoins, I can. Just like with gold and silver, it's easy to buy, but trying to off load it at scale is next to impossible.
Each Bitcoin is made up by 100,000,000 satoshi. In fact, the only thing that is exchanged are satoshi but when somebody has 100M of them, we call it one Bitcoin. So we do have smaller numbers. More to the point, since Bitcoin is increasingly viewed as a store of wealth and its own "asset class," which is attracting more and more institutional attention and driving up the price, transferring Bitcoin from one address to another address is expected to become more and more expensive. As a result of this expectation, Bitcoin, through BitcoinOS' Grail is getting bridged to Cardano. From a Bitcoin user's perspective they will not even know the "work" was done off-chain on a Cardano-based network.
What we're seeing is the continuing transition from physical assets to digital assets. We use to possess music, movies, TV shows, retail sales, et cetra as physically held media. Now those things are largely stored electronically for faster transmission, better security and better long-term storage. Speaking as a real estate broker, with the rise of title scams, the industry is looking for a way to protect titles using blockchain technology.
Years ago, a white paper was written suggesting that (1) the USA create a new Space Force Armed Branch, and (2) that the USA start using blockchain to secure state secrets. With the incoming administration rumors are swirling (everybody involved has signed non disclosure agreements, but why did you guys go to X and meet with X?) that the Cardano network is being considered for securing public votes to state secrets.
Anyway, blockchain is an evolving tech and while there are teething problems and not every crypto token will survive, we are seeing the formation of what will happen in the future and Bitcoin will remain the apex token for storing wealth, or "digital gold," with less hassle for transferring, storing, maintaining security.
As I type here are the ten largest blockchain tokens by market cap.
.