Are we allowed to talk about Bitcoin?

Bitcoin is a currency.

There is a difference between currency and money, even though most people of our generation have amazingly been conditioned to not make the distinction. A currency isn't a store of value. It can be volatile in terms of the value of what you can exchange it for because it has no intrinsic value. ... especially with the way central banks have debased the value of the fiat currencies they control via monetary inflation over the past several decades. A currency's value can go to zero. It is not necessarily a reliable store of value. In fact, a dollar from when the Federal Reserve was created in the United States has lost 99 percent of its purchasing power since then.

Bitcoin is certainly a currency. People assign a value to it and it can be used as a medium of exchange. Which is kind of the definition of a currency. Right now, its utility as a currency is limited because it is extremely volatile. But it is still a currency.

The fact that its value hasn't been stable is reflective of it being in the throes of a speculative mania. ... on the back of what our central bank has done to stoke billions upon billions of dollars of mispriced credit that has created a lot of runaway speculation -- in lots of things other than bitcoin, too.

As long as more and more credit is being created by them (and they have gone crazy over the last decade +), it creates a lot of speculative behavior. What they did with the pandemic as an excuse, unleashed a tsunami of liquidity in markets for risky assets. It's a bit like a bunch of degenerates being set loose in a casino with a lot of chips that were dropped from a helicopter. The decisions people make around the blackjack table with those chips are way different than the ones they would make if they felt directly on the hook for the consequences. The more chips that have been dropped into the casino, the more reckless people have become. That is pretty much what is happening with bitcoin (and NFTs, and worthless companies whose stocks are being bid up to extreme multiples, etc). What the real value of bitcoin is (and whether it is actual money). ... we'll all find out when the current madness ends (and it will).

Money. ... is a store of value. Think of things that have maintained their purchasing power over very long periods of time (i.e. hard assets), can be used as a medium of exchange, are ideally portable, durable and fungible (i.e. -- they are the same everywhere in the world).. ... and there you have money. Money has intrinsic value that bitcoin may or may not actually end up having.