Merchant adoption is not a fundamental of Bitcoin. The currency aspect will follow the store of value speculation and not the other way around.
I think we discussed this already, but store of value needs long-term trust. Gold has a 5000 year record. State bonds have century-level trust. How do you think people will build up trust in bitcoin as a long-term stable store of value ? Who would dare to buy $10,000.- coins to set aside for his retirement 30 years later ?
But that's beside the point, the deflationary nature of Bitcoin encourages saving and discourages casual spending. Unlike the present fiat economy, savers are rewarded. People need to hoard it in order to create value.
Bitcoin is now inflationary like a real 3rd world country fiat: 10% a year nominally, but in fact much more as a lot of coins are in fact out of circulation for the moment. It will take about 8 years before the inflationary nature of bitcoin will be of the order of the nominal Dollar and Euro price inflation.
People will not hoard huge amounts of value for a long time with such an uncertain future and in such an inflationary environment as compared to things like state bonds and gold. The only reason to hoard coins is that one is speculating for "the moon" (low probability - high return).
Monetary assets like gold historically first became currency, and only later, through the currency aspect for a long time and build-up trust, also a store of value. I would like to see any reasoning that could indicate conservative pension funds wanting to invest a lot in bitcoin for a store of value over 20 years or so...
They are doing so right now.
No, almost nobody is holding coins right now just to keep the value and to get that value back 20 years from now with the certainty that the value will more or less be held.
Almost everybody holding coins right now is hoping for a significant value increase. If the reason for holding coins is value *increase* and not *value holding*, then the scheme will fail of course once the hope for value *increase* will stop - that is what I wanted to illustrate.
If you buy at $300, you can hope for $10 000. But in order to sustain $10 000, something must change. You cannot buy at $10 000, with the same incentives as buying at $300. The hope to buy at $10 000, and to reach $3 000 000 is much lower I would think, than to buy at $300 and hoping for $10 000. Moreover, the influx of value needed at $10 000 to support the money supply inflation is much larger than at $ 300.
If the buying and holding incentive is the huge increase in value, we are exactly on the same incentives as a Ponzi: it will fail at a certain point, because at a certain point, to sustain the price, the influx of value needed is too high, and the prospect of still higher prices becomes essentially nihil. At that point the price will plummet, and all people having bought at $50 000 will panic-sell.
The only store of value has buying incentives without any expectation of significant increase in value. If you buy gold, you are not hoping on a factor 30 of value increase in a few years. You hope that it will keep its value (which means, higher price as compared to a devaluating fiat). You may hope for slight increase, and you are not afraid of a small decrease.
Almost nobody is holding bitcoin to KEEP its value in my opinion. If you would know that your coins will have doubled in price 10 years from now, you wouldn't hold your coins. You're hoping for the moon. But if you count on other people hoping for even more moon to get yours, it's going to crash, because that's exactly the drive of a ponzi.
If bitcoin were held as a store of value, then everybody should be happy if the price is almost constant, or would rise slowly to compensate for Dollar inflation. Most hodlers don't hold bitcoin for that.
So they are NOT doing it right now.