Both UK £'s and Bitcoin have no intrinsic value, but only one can be described as Fiat.
I agree much with what is in your Message.
Pardon me if my last post was unclear as it was typed in a rush.
My point was Bitcoins solution to scaling was to have a settlement layer as well as a payment transaction layer.
I mentioned this was inspired by Fiat because Fiat also has a settlement layer (eg in US this is the Fedwire, In UK maybe BACS) as well as a payment layer (eg Paypal). In Fiat Final Settlement occurs much slower than transactional payment systems. In the US I understand it takes weeks.
Possibly you confuse the current fiat money system that is not based upon intrinsic value with earlier fiat ones that were based upon intrinsic value
I agree with much of what you said about intrinsic value. Fiat certainly has no intrinsic value, as is the case with Bitcoin.
The use of Gold was used in the past
despite it having intrinsic value.
In humanity's search for money and what money is, intrinsic value is actually a detriment to the merits of money.
This is because money constitutes a monetary good.
Tobacco/Cigarettes, Barley, Oil. All these may have intrinsic value, however as history has shown, they make for horrible money or stores of wealth. For different reasons.
The reason for the success of Gold as Hard Money for hundreds of years was not its intrinsic value.
Rather there are certain properties of Gold that made it the preferred store of value: Durability, Divisibility, Scarcity, Portability, Frangibility and its Verifiability.
Then is there any other use, or is it essentially based on 1?
There is Bitcoin the Asset and Bitcoin the Network.
For Bitcoin the Asset:
The Price going Up is a huge deal! It attracts more people to look at Bitcoin and to use Bitcoin and to try to understand Bitcoin. Price going up shows it helps store wealth. Ask people in Venezuela, Argentina, many parts of Africa about their loss of value due to runaway inflation.
Here is Bitcoins return for each year over the last 10 years compared to every other Asset class:
https://pasteboard.co/JUzYuF1.jpgThis also grows the Bitcoin the network. From day 1 many people have used the Network for low friction remittances across borders. Using the Network just shows how archaic the traditional Banking system can be.
As mentioned in my earlier post, Lightning also makes use of Bitcoin the Network to basically transfer value across countries instantly and at zero cost. In the US the company Strike is making use of this and in the UK Bottlepay has just launched also using similar technology (albeit not yet across borders)
For more on comparisons between Bitcoin and Fiat and currencies this has been a polpular place to start:
http://shorturl.at/mpGHSBitcoin allows us to teleport any amount of value instantly and at near zero cost across the entire world.
It is like Gold but better as it is without the problems of storage, weight, size and centralization.
Again, forgive the rushed Post, Family beckons.
JF