What gives Bitcoin its value?

Is it the fact that its a digital, decentralised store of value?

Or is it because it gives those looking to transfer value anonymously an easy, fast option?

Bitcoin owes a lot of its success and relatively swift adoption to its use on the darknet. This is an undisputable fact and without it cryptocurrency may not have taken off in the place. In its infancy Bitcoin's value was much more volatile than it is today, believe it or not, and therefore it was not particularly used as a store of value by those that used it as a currency. The fact that there would only ever be 21,000,000 Bitcoin mined did not particularly matter and that might be a reason why thousands of coins mined in the early days have been lost forever. It was marketed as Digital Cash.

The recent bull runs have put that perk on the side burn and have purely focused on the fact that Bitcoin is a the only finite thing in the universe. Institutional investment mainly stems from fear of inflation which can hardly be attributed to the digital features offered by cryptocurrencies. Every transfer and wallet on the blockchain is is meticulously tracked and documented since it is a public ledger. This data is being processed by everyone from private individuals to big government.

                                                                   

The fact that the ledger is public only adds to the benefit of its scarcity since its transparency offers to solve the problems faced by governments and business alike. The transfer of value by companies like MicroStrategy and Grayscale exemplify this. They are not being marketed as value being transformed into a murky world of privacy. This is where I believe the promise of coins like Monero, Zcash, Grin, Beam etc seem to take a different direction to the one fuelling this meteoric rally of past years. These coins have a perfect role of being mixers which can help 'clean' your store of value by starting with Bitcoin and ultimately leaving with Bitcoin. The fact that Monero is completely private offers nothing in this current climate of inflation fear.

This is why, ultimately, I believe that if a coin was to flip Bitcoin as a store of value, it would not need to improve on privacy features. Privacy coins have their place in the digital world but not as stores of value. Sorry MoneroChads!

If you believe otherwise please plead your case in the comment section and enlighten me!