> But if this would take off and get a strong foothold at the prices that we're seeing now (bitcoin almost 10K in dollars), then didn't some subset of techies print a lot more money than there is?
Over the course of history, people crated money out of many physical objects that had the "money" properties. Money is a tool to represent value of exchange. As long as we all agree on it's value.
In the fiat world, the value of money is artificially fixed by the central banks and backed by the military power of its governments. it has effectively an unlimited supply. Quantitative easing is one of the techniques used to quickly increase the supply as it fits the central banks. You, me and all fiat money users have no say in it.
Bitcoin, is a limited amount of money supply that will ever exist. It is backed by math and cryptography and an open source ecosystem. It was decided so by us the people and not central banks. We didn't ask for their permission the same way as they don't ask for ours when they decide to print more.
Many of us believers in Bitcoin do not agree with the way central banks handle the most important tool of our civilization (Money) and do not agree with the current mainstream economic theory. So we decided to exit that system and try our own.
> To me it seems there might be a chance that we're devaluing real currencies by quite a bit over the course of the next couple of years. Of course, the bigger chance is that this is a bubble and it will pop, but what if it isn't?
If fiat currencies get devalued, and they will if the Bitcoin experiment works, then it would just mean fiat money is a weaker money than bitcoin (see Gresham Law[1]). In that case, is it the fault of the inventors if they invented a better system ?
As of the "speculative" nature of bitcoin, yes it is. What drives speculation is greed. Bitcoin at the protocol level is just a communication system. If you couple greed and Metacalfe's Law[2], you obtain a very powerful incentive for the system to grow.
I think of this incentive as a the trojan horse to the current financial system. People will come through greed and stay once they discover and learn about this new system, since it's not likely the central banks will "objectively" assess the value of Bitcoin.
The biggest part of humanity does not benefit from our current central bank system, so it has to get disrupted and replaced with a better one.
Either this, or we're stuck with the current unhuman, exploiting system. As an optimist, I'm betting on the former.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham's_law
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law