I’m asking about Bitcoin before it was used as amedium if exchange, before the Silk Road. How did it have the value against fiat, if not from a group of people buying and selling it from each other, which grew, and therefore the value grew. I believe you, and I cannot answer that because we were not there.
This is how I look at it. There is a difference between a speculative demand for bitcoin and a "transactional" demand for bitcoin. The speculative demand is when buyers and sellers meet and exchange bitcoin for fiat back and forth for the sake of temporary profit. The transactional demand is when people use bitcoin as a medium of exchange not because it has some value in fiat terms but because bitcoin
should be used and seen as a medium of exchange. It is a sort of demand that is driven primarily by ideological reasons rather than economic ones. People would send bitcoin to each other and exchange it for different services and goods so that they could prove that bitcoin actually works as unstoppable electronic cash without authorities behind it. It is natural that they wanted other people to recognize the significance of Satoshi's invention, and that is why they spread awareness that bitcoin exists and works. It was not a Ponzi scheme because the motivation to spread the word was different from that driven by greed and profit-seeking. It was to convince other people to use bitcoin as a medium of exchange. Obviuosly, they didn't succeed and only attracted speculators who don't care about the transactional value of bitcoin.