You’re wrong about store of value

BTC cannot call itself a “store of value” after the autumn we just lived through.

On October 5, Bitcoin traded around $125,000. By December 1, it was hovering near $85,000. That is a drawdown of roughly one-third in less than sixty days. You can dress that up with memes and laser eyes if you want, but no serious economist calls a thing that can lose 30% of its purchasing power in two months a store of value. Even traditional finance commentators who are friendly to gold will tell you that a store of value is something that “doesn’t move too much and doesn’t lose its worth in the long run.”

Bitcoin fails that basic test both in the long and short term.

This isn’t necessarily a problem, but there is a deep, insidious confusion about what, exactly, the “value” in this system is supposed to be.

Value is in the data, not the chip price

A blockchain is not a stack of lottery tickets or “digital gold” or a great national treasury asset.

It is a network that writes to an append-only economic history; a timestamped log of who did what, with whom, and on what terms. In simpler terms, it’s a database.

The asset price on a (dodgy) exchange is just a side effect. The enduring value lies in the data that is written and mined for insight, settlement, and cash flow in business.

When people talk about gold as a store of value, they are not referring to a daily quote so much as a pattern that spans millennia.

One ounce of gold has bought roughly the same “nice suit” from Roman times to the modern era. Its purchasing power has been remarkably stable through wars, currency failures, and political turnover across the globe. The reason is simple: gold is a physical bearer instrument with properties that make it hard to destroy and easy to recognize. It does not need a live network to be redeemable in a crisis.

If the grid goes down, the internet fails, or the world breaks out into some other unplanned chaos, 99% of humans will still recognize the properties and the value of gold.

BTC has none of those properties. It is not physical, and it is not particularly stable. Plus, it’s not even useful or recognizable by anything other than a small group of people at a time.

Its only intrinsic value comes from the utility of its ledger, and BTC’s own governance has spent a decade strangling that utility for fear of growth. You can store your private keys for a long time, but what are they keys to if the network cannot carry the world’s data or its commerce when it matters most?

The irony is that Bitcoin, as originally designed, provides a much more interesting kind of store of value; not an eternally rising chip price, but a permanent, monetizable data substrate, and that value is almost completely overlooked.

And under extreme pressure, it can (and should) be used to conduct commerce using the asset itself or a token built on it.

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The real store of value on a blockchain

Every transaction is a bundle of facts. A token payment between two parties.

A contract execution.

A piece of media wrapped in a smart envelope.

A stablecoin payment between trading desks.

A supply-chain event. 

All written to a scalable ledger, those facts become liquid in ways dollars in a bank account never can.

Data that can be discovered, recombined, and monetized repeatedly is much closer to a true “store of value” than a balance in a speculative unit. The token is just how you pay for writing and reading that data to the distributed database.

On a chain like BSV, that is not a poetic abstraction. The Teranode implementation has demonstrated throughput on the order of a million transactions per second, with mainnet blocks already reaching multiple gigabytes. Fees remain a tiny fraction of a cent per transaction. That combination means you can anchor enormous volumes of economic activity in the ledger, from micropayments using tokens like MNEE, streaming content, identity attestations, IoT telemetry, and high-frequency trading flows.

You can transmit and store that value.

In the world we could build, the store of value is not “one BTC” sitting in cold storage. It is a portfolio of live business processes, cash-flowing data feeds, and tokenized rights, all riding on a chain that does not choke when demand spikes.

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What actually behaves like a store of value

People do actually need asymmetric stores of value in a crisis, too, but if you want a wealth hedge, there are much saner choices than trying to time BTC candles.

Gold and silver have a documented history as long-term stores of value that hold purchasing power over decades and centuries, particularly during periods of monetary stress.

High-quality Swiss watches from renowned brands like Rolex have quietly evolved into a modern form of portable savings that easily cross borders and serve as a form of payment in a pinch. Classic cars, well-chosen antiques, and fine art play similar roles for people who understand their markets and don’t need fast liquidity.

And, of course, there is the most underrated “store of value” of all: a small, boring business in a thriving region that generates cash every month. It can be a car wash, a dental practice, a self-storage facility, or an HVAC company. The common thread is that in a crisis, there are still customers, still invoices, still work to do.

That is what liquidity really looks like.

BTC, by contrast, is liquid only at the courtesy of exchanges and only when the queues are short. In a real panic, when everybody needs out at once, the network reveals its design trade-offs in “failure” as a response to broadcasting a payment under pressure, and that is unacceptable.

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BTC is in a rush for the exits

We have already seen what happens when BTC comes under stress. During periods of high demand, transaction fees have spiked to tens or even hundreds of dollars, and ordinary users have been pushed off the network while arbitraging whales and high-fee traders fight for block space. In late 2017 and again in subsequent mempool “wars,” unconfirmed transaction backlogs stretched for days, and the little guy never won those wars.

Now extend that pattern to a genuine macro shock: a currency crisis, a major war, a global banking panic. The mythology suggests that Bitcoin will serve as the safe exit route, the digital lifeboat for capital fleeing broken systems. The reality under BTC’s self-imposed constraints is far less heroic. If everyone runs for the exit at once, the exit narrows, the toll booth raises its prices, and a significant portion of the user base is priced out of safety.

That is the opposite of a store of value.

A good store of value becomes more accessible, not less, when people need it. You can still hand someone a gold coin, still pawn a watch, still sell a car. A properly scaled chain, like BSV, can process a flood of redemptions, rebalancings, and hedges without blinking, because the block space is elastic enough to absorb panic volume at stable fees.

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A better way to think about ‘value’ in Bitcoin

If we stop worshiping the BTC price feed and start paying attention to what blockchains actually do well, a healthier picture emerges.

A scalable chain is an engine for permanent, permissionless record keeping. It is a settlement layer for tokens representing productive assets. It is a timestamping and notarization layer for contracts, IP, and media. It is an identity and reputation substrate for individuals who want to be compensated fairly for their data, rather than having it harvested and sold by platforms behind their backs.

On such a chain, long-term value is not found in hoarding coins and praying for the number to go up. It is found in building and owning streams of valuable data that other people will continue to pay to read, validate, and connect to their own economic lives. The store of value is the working ledger itself and the businesses it makes possible.

BTC has chosen a different path. It throttled throughput, embraced congestion pricing, and leaned into the role of “digital gold” in name only, without the centuries of behavioral proof that make real gold what it is. That is why a 30% drawdown in two months is not just an unfortunate blip, but a symptom of a design that has mistaken speculation for savings.

If you want a hedge, buy something you can actually use, hold, or operate; gold, silver, a good watch, or a small business. If you want to participate in the next wave of monetary infrastructure, look to chains that can actually hold the world’s data at scale and the tokenized economies that ride on them.

Stores of value do not live on trading screens. They live in things that continue to work when the lights flicker, and BTC does not qualify.

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Watch: Peter Schiff sees value of Bitcoin with Tokenized Gold