People use cryptocurrency for genuinely different reasons - and the reason matters enormously for how they should approach it. A person using Bitcoin to send money to family abroad needs to understand different things than a person speculating on Ethereum's price, who in turn needs to understand different things than a person using DeFi protocols to earn yield on their savings. This lesson maps the main motivations for crypto use honestly - including the dominant one that most educational content glosses over - so you can identify which, if any, apply to you.
Investment and Speculation
The most honest starting point: the dominant reason most retail participants enter the crypto market is Speculation - the expectation that prices will go up and they will profit. This is not a criticism. Speculation is a legitimate economic activity. Markets need speculators to provide liquidity and price discovery. But calling speculation "investment" misleads people about its nature and risks.
True investment involves deploying capital into productive assets that generate returns through earnings, dividends, or rent. Cryptocurrency - at least Bitcoin - does not generate earnings. Its return to holders comes entirely from price appreciation driven by demand exceeding supply. This is closer to speculation in a commodity than investment in a business. This does not make it bad - but it makes the risk profile fundamentally different from investing in a profitable company.
Store of Value
A significant and growing group of Bitcoin holders - including some institutional investors - hold it primarily as a store of value: a hedge against inflation and currency debasement. The Digital Gold narrative positions Bitcoin as a scarce asset that maintains purchasing power over time better than currencies whose supply is continuously expanded.
The case is intellectually coherent: Bitcoin's supply is genuinely fixed, its inflation rate is declining and will eventually reach zero, and it is beyond the control of any government or central bank. The weakness of the case is the volatility - an asset that falls 80% from its peak is a poor short-term store of value, even if its long-term trajectory has been upward. Gold's price is also volatile - but not 80% volatile. Many long term holders choose to HODL through these extreme cycles.
Payments and Remittances
The original use case envisioned by Satoshi - peer-to-peer electronic cash - has found its most practical real-world application in international Remittance. A worker in the Gulf sending money to family in India or the Philippines can use cryptocurrency to transfer value in minutes for a fraction of the cost of a traditional bank transfer or remittance service.
El Salvador made Bitcoin legal tender in 2021 - a real-world experiment in crypto as a national currency. The results have been mixed: adoption among the local population has been limited, the price volatility makes everyday use impractical, and the International Monetary Fund has raised concerns about financial stability risks.
Access to DeFi
Decentralised Finance (DeFi) has created an entirely new category of crypto user: people who use blockchain-based protocols to lend, borrow, earn yield, and trade without traditional financial intermediaries. The appeal is programmable, permissionless financial services available to anyone with internet access - no credit check, no application, no institutional approval.
DeFi protocols have generated significant returns in bull markets - and significant losses, hacks, and protocol failures in bear markets. The risks are covered in detail in Course 05.
Ideological Conviction
A meaningful portion of the crypto community - particularly among Bitcoin's earliest and most committed holders - is motivated primarily by ideological conviction: the belief that decentralised, censorship-resistant money is a social good, that financial Self-Sovereignty should be available to everyone, and that the existing financial system's concentration of power in governments and institutions is a genuine problem that cryptocurrency addresses.
This ideological dimension is sometimes dismissed by sceptics as cult-like. It is better understood as the natural result of people who have thought seriously about monetary history, central bank policy, and financial exclusion reaching conclusions about which technology best addresses those problems. Whether or not you share the conclusion, understanding the argument is essential for understanding why Bitcoin in particular has the committed community it does.