For anyone asking about things you can buy with it, you can rent a track light pacing system.
The developer guide to bitcoin (
https://developer.bitcoin.org/devguide/block_chain.html
)
I like gold and bitcoin as a medium of exchange (also silver or even ammo). I agree that gold has unique properties to make it valuable for many uses. I call bitcoin a medium of exchange rather than a store of value because the original bitcoin whitepaper (
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
) released in 2008 is titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System." Many other cryptocurrencies have been developed because they feel that bitcoin no longer meets this basic requirement and this resulting in Bitcoin Cash forking from Bitcoin to allow for more transactions in each block and thus lower transaction fees.
While I believe that bitcoin can exist without the internet as we know it, it would basically be unusable. Without access to electricity, I don't see how it would be possible. If I Am Legend happens, I would rather have gold than bitcoin. Since I consider I Am Legend to be a very unlikely scenario, I think owning some bitcoin makes sense.
For people looking for what you can do with a bitcoin that isn't trading or spending, I suggest researching the Bitcoin scripting language. I can write anything I want to the Bitcoin blockchain (and most other blockchains) and it can never be erased. This can be a powerful weapon against censorship of the biggest tech giants like Facebook, Twitter, and the overzealous moderators of the Letsrun forums (who I expect to see testifying before Congress very soon).
That being said, I think it has huge downside risk up to 95%+ loss of purchasing power in short, medium, and long term.
And to argue against my own point, you may ask whether miners would continue to process transactions for the same amount of bitcoin if the price were to fall by that much.
Credit card companies and most major US banks do not share any of my values and probably don't like me very much. I would prefer not to give them 2.5% of every transaction. I would like to send my transaction fees to pretty much anyone but them. If I can deprive them of transaction fees, I can ruin their businesses. They have been censoring people with businesses that I consider to be legitimate such as Defense Distributed and Gab for many years. Bitcoin makes this financial censorship much more difficult, and I don't see any tool that can combat censhorship of online payments besides cryptocurrency. And because it is an open platform, you do not have to rely on services like Coinbase, Crypto dot com, Robinhood, Strike (Twitter-backed), or Bitpay to hold your bitcoin and decide whether or not to allow you access to it. You can use the open source BTC Pay Server to handle your own payments and run it on your own server. One of my main complaints about the adoption of Bitcoin in El Salvador is that most people and businesses seem to be using custodial solutions.
Some more useful information:
Fees are paid to miners and fluctuate based on supply and demand. The current market fee can be used to send $1 or $1 billion for the same amount of bitcoin. So if it costs 8 cents to send $1, you can send $1 billion for 8 cents.. And as others have pointed out, the main bitcoin network has minimum fees that are roughly 1.3 one-millionths of the price of a bitcoin, which at the current price of $58,000 USD equates to 8 cents minimum. If bitcoin rises or falls by some factor, minimum fees will rise or fall back that factor as well. Confirmation times can take 20 minutes if you're willing to pay a high fee to have your transaction confirmed quickly. The lightning network allows for lower fees and instant transactions by basically creating a side ledger that doesn't incur the transaction fee until the user wants to withdraw into another bitcoin address. Lightning is still considered beta. FYI, a good site to check fees on the bitcoin main network is
https://mempool.space
Seed phrases were introduced to allow users to remember 12 words that are generated by computers or dice randomly. These 12 words can be input into a wallet application like Blue Wallet (a great app) and can allow the user access to their bitcoin. Since this seed phrase is required to access the bitcoin, the user must keep it secret or their bitcoin can be stolen. If the user loses their device where the seed phrase is stored, they must remember the seed phrase or the bitcoin will be lost. But this is a very powerful concept that I can create a bitcoin wallet in the US on my computer, fly to another country with nothing but my passport, and use another device that I obtained in that country to access my bitcoin. And if that country is El Salvador, I can spend the bitcoin at most businesses. You can setup a 12 word phrase using this site which you can even download to an offline computer and use things like dice rolls to generate the words randomly -
https://iancoleman.io/bip39/