here is the setup, because this argument usually gets made badly.
money does two separate jobs. it holds value over time, and it moves between people. we assume one thing has to do both, because the cash in your pocket does both. it sits there, and it pays for lunch.
bitcoin was built to do both too. but look at who is buying it in size right now. a lot of it is pension funds and asset managers, the firms that invest other people's retirement savings, and they mostly buy through an ETF. an ETF is a fund you buy a share of in an ordinary brokerage account, and the fund holds the real bitcoin for you. those buyers are never going to spend it. they hold it the way they hold gold.
meanwhile the spending is drifting somewhere else. some of it goes to lightning, a network that settles small bitcoin payments off the main chain and only writes to the chain when a connection opens or closes. more of it goes to stablecoins, which are tokens designed to always be worth one dollar. a company issues those, and that company can freeze them. an ordinary person paying for something online today is far more likely to touch a dollar token than a bitcoin.
so here is my claim. bitcoin is winning the store of value job and losing the everyday payment job, and those are two different markets with two different buyers. the asset can succeed completely without your coffee ever settling on the chain.
the best argument against me is lightning, because on lightning you are still sending real bitcoin rather than a dollar token. if the wallets get easy enough, the payment layer never leaves.
what would change my mind: shops taking real bitcoin for real goods growing faster than dollar token payments, several quarters in a row, showing up in actual sales rather than transfers between exchanges.
either way, the thing you hold and the rail you pay with do not have to be the same product. that is worth sitting with before you argue about which one is the real bitcoin.
