"There are two main reasons to doubt bitcoin's viability as an investment....Another is more philosophical: Digital currencies have no fundamental value, so have no place in a portfolio."<p>There is no such thing as an objective theory of value. ALL value is subjective (meaning each person values the same thing differently). The more you learn about what money is, the more you realize that there are qualities of money that make it valuable/appealing to be used AS money (e.g. fungibility, low to no inflation, difficult to counterfeit, scarce, easy to verify authenticity). This is why things like sand and hair make for poor money, and this is why the free market essentially chose gold as money before governments co-opted, confiscated, and controlled it. Gold would most likely be the primary money today if people had been free to transact using gold as money [0].<p>Governments stopped the use of gold as money because they can use fiat currencies to fund the operation of the government (by increasing the supply of fiat and buying their own debt with it), reducing the purchasing power of their own currency and acting as a tax on savers.
Bitcoin is a serious threat to that because unlike gold, it is orders of magnitude more difficult for governments to confiscate and control.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_dollar_(private_currency)" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_dollar_(private_curr...</a><p>EDIT: Spelling