I love Bitcoin Bear Markets
I love Bitcoin bear markets, because I can send Bitcoin across the world without permission whether it's $5, or $500,000, but the digital gold people lose their minds. You see it in the terse cope posted to social media. You see business ventures built on the assumption that the fiat exchange rate will keep going up begin to implode.
There is a religious belief that price appreciation is a baked-in feature, programmatically ingrained in this network of nodes. People share all kinds of models regarding wallet activity, hashpower, and other such metrics, arguing theories about how the price is guaranteed to rise higher. They study price charts of the past, faithfully assuring themselves that behavior will repeat. Above all, there is a prophetic belief that someday, the entire world will realize what it's missing out on, and desperately clammor to take every satoshi off of every exchange.
What's it for?
There is an embarassingly common belief among bitcoiners that if they hold an amount of bitcoin, they are entitled to grow rich from it. This belief is vindicated by events of the past. Every long-term rise in the exchange rate has made somebody wealthy, at least on paper. So everyone now assumes that however much fiat they traded for their UTXO, their patience will be rewarded with value eventually. They may be right, they may not, but to believe it is somehow programatically guaranteed beggars any sort of logic.
The ONLY guarantee to which you are entitled is:
IF you hold your own keys,
and IF you run your own node,
and IF the network stays sufficiently decentralized,
then you will in the future be able to broadcast a transaction with a UTXO you received in the past, without having to ask any intermediary for permission, and without having to ask the receiver to trust you.
Bitcoin is nothing more than an honest accounting of past transactions. There are no coins. There are unspent transaction outputs. What you call a balance is simply the resutling output of a transaction recorded in the past. It's a ledger that balances every ten minutes on average, where anyone can generate a receiving account without having to seek permission from any bank or governing authority. This is the feature and the value proposition.
Fiat price appreciation is not a feature of the code. A limited circulating supply is, but that alone does not grant value. Past behavior is not indicative of future results either. Scarcity is not value. Scarcity and demand are factors that together affect price. The demand comes from the utility, and the ultimate utility is the ability to receive without permission or trust.
Always been this way
This is a feature which has been functioning flawlessly since Satoshi launched the code in 2009, long before SegWit, long before Taproot, long before any of the devs in control of the Core repository currently began salivating over Ethereum style smart contract functionality. This is the feature which enabled the Silk Road before the Bitcoin price had even crossed $10. This is the feature which enabled WikiLeaks to continue receiving donations after being de-banked. This is the feature which still today enables nation-states to route around SWIFT.
The demand to use this feature is what gives the network its value. It's what enables the digital gold obsessives to see the fiat denominated capital gains on their UTXOs that they crave. This is the killer feature. There is no better use-case, and Bitcoin needs no other use-case. Adding any functionality which diminishes this use can only diminish the value of Bitcoin.