>you have an exchange for Beanie Babies
When people see Beanie "value rise 400% per year," they'll build exchanges. Same as Bitcoin.
>Being able to produce bitcoin by yourself is a very important aspect
Oh? You mean one can spend $100 to mine $20, that sort of a thing? Because that's roughly what non-factory miners can expect.
If you want, I could create Giant's Place, a Beanie Cloudmining website, where you can pretend that you're mining Beanies while I return $20 out of each $100 you give me.
How would that be different from Bitcoin?
At higher level of abstraction, these are good questions. From this point of view, all the financial products can be regarded as Beanie Babies for majority of the investors, you just need to find some way to promote its value and set up an exchange then you can pump and dump them
That's exactly why bitcoin is different, since you can choose to mine bitcoin instead of purchasing it. Your figures of home mines' profitability is off. In fact many home miners have large advantage against industry miners, since they might have free electricity, or even use miners as a heating device, so that the running cost is almost zero, and they can use already ROIed hardware so that the initial cost is also zero
My 400% price figure is just a metaphor, in reality the figures will be more likely in 20-50% range per year, this is still extremely high investment return so the most attracted users will be investors