It keeps chugging, but it's not terribly useful for a typical person. Close to $20 for a transaction that takes an hour or so to complete is kinda rough.
If you are a normal person in a stable country it's not terribly useful. If you are a normal person in a not so stable place, it can be very useful to you.
The difference, of course, is that the price of Bitcoin also goes up sometimes.
Inelastic supply means the price depends entirely on demand, so it will shoot up and down when demand changes. This is a speculator’s playground.
But another word for the situation causing a price increase is a shortage. Stability comes from elastic supply that responds to demand. Algorithmic stablecoins are snake oil, but they do appear to have more stable prices until they collapse.
To prevent that, there needs to be someone willing to buy back the currency when demand collapses (losing a lot of money in the process) rather than running away like everyone else.
Does Bitcoin have enough die-hard believers to do that? So far they’ve been able to stave off complete collapse and come back stronger, but in the future, who knows. When investors get spooked and sell off Bitcoin ETF’s, what happens?
Not being able to reverse transactions is itself a risk, and a deflationary currency that is susceptible to hoarding isn't a great idea IMHO. And given gold's fluctuating value (though better than BTC's), I'm not sure I'd consider it a good store of value; it certainly isn't a good inflation hedge:
* https://www.nber.org/papers/w18706
* https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3667789
Neither in the short-term, nor the longer-term:
> Andre Sharon, head of the international research department at Drexel Burnham, Inc., notes, “the value of gold essentially derives from its capacity to preserve real capital and purchasing power.”† I select this particular quotation because of the prestige of the organization and the position of the spokesman, but statements in this vein can be found in great numbers. They can be traced back for generations and in many countries. How can this proposition so contrary to statistical fact become so widely believed and quoted? Possibly because gold has preserved capital in cataclysmic cases it is easy to infer that it can be trusted to do the same in less severe circumstances. To extrapolate from gold’s protection in singular catastrophes to its use as a strategy against cyclical infation is an example of faulty inductive reasoning.
* PDF: http://csinvesting.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/RoyJastram...
* https://www.pwlcapital.com/will-gold-save-the-day/
And being gold-backed does not help with price stability either:
* https://archive.is/FWKcL / https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/why-the...
In fact, having a currency / monetary base that cannot be easy grown can hinder economic growth:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bullion_Famine
The sooner countries abandoned the gold standard, the sooner they started recovering from the Great Depression:
* https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/10/the-great-depression-...
Bitcoin has no such issue, it's completely transparent and far cheaper.
Back in 2013, we'd get a BTC donation every week or two. Now we get one maybe every 3 months. In 2013, the average BTC transaction fee was about 3 cents. Today, the average fee was $19.76.
For as "inevitable" as it's supporters claim it to be, it sure is taking a long time for anyone to care about it, outside of bitcoin maxi twitter influencers.
The rest of the crypto industry has moved on. It simply took to long for bitcoin to be used for anything outside of speculation. And other chains have taken up the actual transactions usecase.
L2 chains are where I stopped being interested in crypto. It's like reading the plaque of Ozymandias and thinking to yourself "Ah, the desert. What a lovely place to build my next palace."