What gives Bitcoin value? In my opinion, the only value is the belief that Bitcoin will eventually become a viable international payment platform. When everyone needs to be holding some bitcoins to be able to buy their daily bread, the bitcoin will be naturally rare and valuable - I think the value of a bitcoin would be sufficient to buy a quite proper house in such a situation.

At the other hand, Bitcoin as a "store of value" only, without the payments use-case, that's a dead end. Currently the very most buyers of Bitcoins are buying Bitcoins just because they speculate the price will increase even more. That's not sustainable - that's just "digital tulip mania".

I'm iterating over and over again how important the Bitcoin scaling debate is. For the last four years or so, the so-called "small-blockers" have more or less decided the direction of the project. In their mind, bitcoin should not be considered a means of payment, but a store of value. We haven't had any meaningful capacity increase for ages, due to that the bitcoin transaction fees have just grown and grown, and reliability has also gone down and down. I said in December last year that we were heading for a bubble ... the price back then was less than 1/4 of what it's now, so I was wrong.

I'm still concerned that we're in a big bubble, but if the SegWit2X-initiative succeeds in November, then maybe there is a hope that we'll see continued growth. If capacity stays constrained at 1 MB blocks, I believe we're in for a big crash sooner or later.