...and me using bitcoin cannot possibly tell me anything relevant to the sources of my skepticism.
So wrong Jorge. With the best will in the world you should really know better. Would you expect the same from a student?
Seriously. Download Bitcoin-QT. Sign up to an exchange. Buy yourself 0.1 BTC and spend some of it on junk.
To continue to plough this much time and effort into researching cryptocurrencies without having gone through that simple step seems daft.
WOW... I agree with this!!! I cannot see how anyone who is spending lots of time with BTC should at least have a little bit to play around with in order to see how it really works... to open up a few accounts... too...
People speculate on the BTC/USD pair (or BTC/crypto) just like they speculate on EUR/USD for instance. They all do it to make more money, because that's what speculators do. Now Bitcoin is a very young currency and still in its volatile growth phase, so it makes sense that more people are holding on to their coins for a longer period of time compared to Euros or Dollars for instance. This is going to change eventually as merchant adoption and the userbase grows. It won't be as easy to move the price around as much when BTC is a trillion dollar market.
Ok, I'll try to explain with more clarity. Maybe there is a language barrier that confuses you.
Currencies at forex = attractive for trading
BTC = Attractive for investment
Fiat currencies are unattractive as investments because they are inflationary and there is a good logic behind it. People are not making money on forex by investing into a currency, but they are making money by trading currencies with one another and make profit by value fluctuation.
People at forex are not investing, but they are trading.
I tried to be as clear as possible.
GREAT explanation...