06-08-2026 
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The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of CoinGeek.
- BTC as a ‘store of value’: Are you holding your money?
- Illusion of digital scarcity and reality of value
- Gold: Scarcity alone doesn’t define true worth
- Saylor: The loudest champion showed everyone how the story ends
- Unconstrained Prosperity: A vault lacking limitations
- Preserving Worth: The essential nature of a store of value
BTC traded around $62,000 last week, down from $72,145 at the start of the month, and the usual voices were right on cue. “One BTC is still one BTC.” “Zoom out.” “Buy the dip.” “BTC is on sale.” A 14% drop in a few days is rebranded as a buying opportunity because, in the store-of-value religion, a falling price is bullish and a rising price is also bullish. No event can falsify the faith.
I have said this before, and I will keep saying it forever. If the entire purpose of BTC is to be a store of value, and the only reason it qualifies as a store of value is that it is provably scarce, then you are not holding money. You are holding a position in a race to hoard magic beans. The beans are scarce. Everyone agrees the beans are scarce. That is the whole pitch. The beans don’t do anything.
We have run this experiment before
In 1720, Isaac Newton, the smartest man alive, put a fortune into South Sea Company stock because the price kept climbing and everyone he respected was buying. He got out early, watched his friends keep getting richer, jumped back in near the top, and lost around 20,000 pounds, the bulk of his wealth. The line attributed to him afterward still stings: he could calculate the motion of the heavenly bodies but not the madness of men.
Scarcity and price action are not value. A thing that is only worth something because somebody else might want it later is a confidence game wearing a nice suit. The defenders will tell you the beauty of BTC is precisely that nobody uses it for anything. It just sits there as pristine digital savings, and they call that a feature. They took a system Satoshi Nakamoto titled “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” and bragged that they had successfully amputated the cash. Imagine buying a truck and bragging that you never put anything in the bed.
But gold does not pay a dividend either
The honest objection comes back fast from the guys who really, really want more people to HODL. Gold throws off no cash flow, and gold has held its value for 5,000 years, so why pick on BTC? Because gold is used. It is pressed into wedding rings and cathedral domes, bonded onto the contacts inside the phone in your hand, packed into satellites and surgical tools, and stacked in vaults as the final settlement asset between nations that trust nothing else. Its monetary premium sits atop a floor of real demand.
When speculation drains out of gold, jewelers and central banks are still there bidding, and last year, central banks bought it by the hundreds of tonnes while buying essentially no BTC at all. Strip every speculator out of BTC and ask what the floor is. The answer is another speculator. The “digital gold” pitch borrowed gold’s reputation and threw away what earned it in the first place. Without that floor, a scarce token is like a Beanie Baby that ships with a cryptographic certificate of authenticity, which is kind of a cool idea, now that I think of it!
The flywheel only spins one way
This is where the savings crowd should be paying attention, because their loudest champion just showed everyone how the story ends. BTC was a phenomenal investment if you bought it a decade ago. It has been a mediocre store of value for the people doing the preaching, because most of them missed that boat. Michael Saylor did not show up until 2020. His company, Strategy (NASDAQ: MSTR), now holds roughly 843,000 Bitcoin at a blended cost that recent filings put north of $66,000 a coin, with the aggressive 2025 and 2026 buys dragging the average up into the $70,000s. BTC just printed $62,000. On the coins he is holding right now, Saylor is underwater, and so is every follower he told to back up the truck near the top.
Then this week, the high priest of “never sell” broke his own orthodoxy. He sold. Strategy disclosed in a June 1 filing that it sold “32 bitcoin” in late May, its first sale since December 2022. The 32 coins are a rounding error to the company’s stack, for sure, but the reason behind them is not. Strategy now sits under roughly $15.5 billion of preferred stock and $6.7 billion of convertible notes, and those instruments demand cash. The variable-rate preferred series he nicknamed “Stretch,” ticker STRC, was set to pay 11.5% a year as of June 1. You cannot pay an 11.5% cash dividend with an asset that yields nothing, so back in December the company set up a dedicated “USD Reserve” to cover its dividends and interest, and by the end of May that reserve held $900 million. It even spent $1.38 billion buying back $1.5 billion of its own 2029 notes. The magic beans produce no income, so to feed the obligations stacked on top of the beans, you sell beans.The whole machine only ran in one direction. Issue stock for more than the coins behind it are worth, buy more coins, let the premium pull the share price higher, then issue again. That works only while the market pays more than a dollar for every dollar of BTC on the books. When the premium collapses, and it always collapses when the price falls, you can no longer print your way forward, but the dividends still come due. So the engine quietly reverses, with a 32-coin filing on a Monday. A store of value you are structurally forced to liquidate to meet your obligations is not a store of value. It is a confession.
This is the same man who told ordinary people to mortgage their homes and pour the cash into Bitcoin, who posted last year that you should “sell a kidney if you must, but keep the Bitcoin.” The evangelism only runs in one direction. When the company he runs actually needed dollars, Saylor wasn’t in line to sell any part of himself. The organ it sold was BTC.
A vault with no walls
Walk past the corporate balance sheets, and the problem gets worse, because this one is baked into the protocol. Bitcoin is designed to pay miners who secure it in two ways: a block subsidy of freshly minted coins and transaction fees. The subsidy is the part everyone celebrates, and it is also the part engineered to vanish. It halves every four years. Currently, it is 3.125 coins per block. In 2028, it drops to 1.5625, by which point more than 96% of all the Bitcoin that will ever exist has already been found, and it keeps halving toward zero from there. The plan, written into the design, is that transaction fees take over as the subsidy fades.
Now point that plan at a chain that brags about not transacting. Fees on BTC run somewhere around 10 to 15% of what miners earn, spiking only when the network is congested. One 2026 estimate put the math plainly: to replace today’s subsidy with fees alone, the average transaction would need to pay about $80. A network that has spent a decade insisting real people should never actually use it has no credible way to fund its own defense once the new coins stop flowing. Security tracks miner revenue, so as the subsidy falls and the fees never arrive, the hash rate that makes the chain expensive to attack falls with it. You cannot guard a vault on the theory that nobody is ever allowed inside, because the guards work on commission. A store of value that cannot pay for its own security is not storing anything. It is waiting for incentives to change.
A store of value has to store something
So when does the crowd wake up? A store of value has to store value, and value does not arise from scarcity alone. It comes from use. The dollar is not scarce in the slightest, and it runs the planet because the whole world is forced to transact in it. The demand to use a thing underwrites the demand to hold it.
Bitcoin was built to be used. It is a peer-to-peer electronic cash, payments that clear for a fraction of a cent, data and tokens and contracts, the whole machine running on chain at a fee low enough that normal people transact without thinking about it. That is also the only honest answer to the security problem. You do not pay for a network’s defense by charging $80 a transaction to a handful of hoarders. You pay for it by processing billions of tiny transactions that each carry a sliver of a cent, so the fees add up to a real budget without pricing anyone out.
Volume is the security model. Volume was always about the security model. A network that only hoards is just a museum full of hashes. A network that gets used is money.
We either get transactions back on chain where Satoshi put them, or we spend another decade listening to the magic-bean cartel explain why a falling price, a forced sale, an underwater prophet, and zero utility are all, somehow, bullish. Scarcity was never the hard part. Usefulness is the whole game, and we are losing it one “store of value” sermon at a time.
Be good to each other and put something on chain.
This opinion piece is published to encourage discussion. The author’s views are their own and do not constitute legal, procurement, or policy advice, nor do they represent the positions of CoinGeek or its partners.
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