Bitcoin makes sense as a store of value because it is likely to survive dramatic global economic failure. The short term volatility is higher, but it's counter-correlated with almost everything else and is a great hedge against societal collapse.
Perhaps not the most fun thing to hedge against, but just like buying life insurance it's a good idea.
Your theory is that a digital currency relying on a delicate, sophisticated international network and an even more delicate technology supply chain, plus massive amounts of wasteful energy consumption will do well in "dramatic global economic failure"? I think "likely" is doing an awful lot of work there.
Bitcoin only produces about 100 kilobytes of new data every minute, and only the consensus builders (the miners) need to have any sort of real time access to that data stream. Participants can have latencies of days or even months and still be able to correctly build consensus.
In extreme meltdown scenarios, you can broadcast Bitcoin over FM radio, the data rates are literally low enough. Spending bitcoin requires sending _hundreds_ of bytes, which again is small enough that you can drop down to very robust and simple technologies if you need to.
Bitcoin has no "wasteful energy requirement". It adjusts the amount of hashing you need to do based on the amount of competition that's doing hashing. If 80% of the hashrate suddenly disappears, Bitcoin runs slowly for a couple of weeks and then significantly drops the hashrate requirements for the network to progress.
For efficiency, many Bitcoin mining farms are established within a couple hundred meters of the power plants producing the electricity, which means that Bitcoin also generally has minimal dependence on the global electricity grid, even though it consumes an enormous amount of electricity.
Bitcoin's robustness to societal meltdowns is one of the things that makes it really interesting.
The notion that people will wait days or months to settle survival transactions after a catastrophe is absurd. As is the notion that after major global collapse there will be a robust global network so that planetary consensus can be achieved. Ditto that enough people will care about global transactions when global trade falls apart.
Bitcoin can't even build a significant user base now. Approximately nobody buys anything with it. Compared with debit cards or cash or mobile money systems like MPesa, it's a rounding error. If it's not better than any of the existing payment systems, it's not going to get better in some sort of prepper-fantasy collapse.
That's only because of fund degrossing. The idea that it's a safe haven for a near-world ending event (but not so disastrous as to wipe out all miners), is still valid
Perhaps not the most fun thing to hedge against, but just like buying life insurance it's a good idea.