You have probably heard the argument that Bitcoin stores value because its price goes up. But that is not what storing value truly means. Price is simply what the last buyer paid for an item. Storing value, in a true sense, is the capacity of an item to provide something itself.
When you buy a car or a digital song, the item itself can provide driving or entertainment. Likewise, if you buy a unit in a system, the system itself should have the capacity to provide something.
An obvious example is shares in a company. The company itself has the capacity to provide dividends, buybacks, or liquidation proceeds to shareholders.
Another example is fiat money, which consists of units of debt in a banking system. Each unit of that money is created by a commercial or central bank as a loan to an individual, a company, or a government. When borrowers acquire those units to repay their loans, they provide something to those who hold the units. Individuals and companies provide products, services, and labor, while governments provide the settlement of tax obligations. If borrowers default, banks provide their seized assets to unit holders at auctions.
In both examples, the system that issued the units provides something to holders of those units.
Bitcoin is different. It is a system that issues units to acknowledge that participants expend energy to secure them in a decentralized database. The system itself has no capacity to provide anything to holders of its units. It only produces and maintains units that represent energy expenditure. With no capacity to provide anything to anyone, the system basically wastes energy.
So when Bitcoin supporters say that Bitcoin stores value because the price has increased, that is clearly false. That value was not stored in Bitcoin but in the new buyer’s willingness to provide something to the Bitcoin holder.
Bitcoin only stores proof that energy was wasted. It is essentially a value-destroying mechanism that consumes real energy only to give participants hope of selling the proof of waste to a greater fool.