We all have our point of view on how bitcoin should be used. Imho you can view bitcoin as whatever you like. Bitcoin can serve as a store of value, a currency or an asset.
I think for most people, bitcoin is an asset more than it is a currency. If a business adopts bitcoin as a payment method and gives a discount for customers who pay in bitcoin, many still wouldn't pay in Bitcoin because they are hodling their bitcoins for the price to increase. I’m saying this from personal experience and I’m sure other members who have adopted bitcoin as payment in their business would agree with me.
Which is quite the problem, don’t you think? For a currency that is widely hailed to be an alternative to fiat, we haven’t made much progress in this aspect. The mindset that you’ve mentioned is precisely the aspect that is detrimental to Bitcoin’s success.
If you were to pitch Bitcoin to someone, you can pitch in the direction that Bitcoin is a good store of value. But for what? Why are people willing to pay more and more money for Bitcoin? Not because of being FOMO, I hope. The answer that we should be giving is that it has the potential to replace financial systems in the far future and thus you should invest in the currency of the future. It doesn’t help if we’re so fearful of spending Bitcoins.
Make no mistake, Bitcoin’s intention is to become a P2P electronic cash system. If people only invest in Bitcoin because they think its going to make them rich, then its a typical sign of a bubble.
I agree that the purpose of creating bitcoin was for it to be a peer-to-peer currency that does not depend on any 3rd party but as of now, I don't think we can make that happen. Although we have turned bitcoin into a speculative asset for profit, even if we had not turned it into an asset, it would hardly have become a currency. The biggest barrier is the government because they will not allow a currency that is not under their control to be widely circulated and used. So it's not so bad that people turn bitcoin into an asset.
Bitcoin has useful use cases, it's not like tulips so I don't think there will be any bubble here. The Bitcoin ETF is probably proof of that, because if it were truly useless then I don't think an ETF would be proposed and passed.