It’s because the odds are objectively against Bitcoin’s long-term success. It’s very difficult to start anything that depends on a lot of people using it, and the challenges proliferate when that thing is a whole entire new type of money.
There are countless possible deaths of Bitcoin. The technology fails. Overspeculationcauses an irrecoverable crash. The price never settles down. Deflationary pressure annihilates liquidity.
A government shuts it down. A new currency makes it obsolete. Users abandon it for some otherreason. And so on ...
If Bitcoin is successful, it could prove that money doesn’t need to function as a stable store of value — the price of Bitcoin could jump around constantly, and in the age of the internet it’s trivial to program prices of goods and services to fluctuate with it.
Its success could also prove that use as a medium of exchange can be the basis for believing a currency is a store of value.
If people believe that they will be able to buy things with Bitcoin and exchange it for other currencies indefinitely, that could convince them to use it as a store of value. Many early adopters have already put their savings into Bitcoin.
And if the technology is sound and the user base is (eventually) global, that doesn’t seem that insane.