Yes, Bitcoin is a replacement for central banking currencies. Its the first few lines of the white paper.

This is how money works. If you use a medium of exchange and unit of account for goods and services then that medium must increase at the same rate as the increase in goods and services otherwise you get second and third order effects such as inflation, contraction, rising unemployment, etc., directly impacting its ability to act as a unit of account.

In Bitcoin you don't generate cash, you earn block rewards for acting as a consensus broker which otherwise would require a central banking settlement layer. This activity, tied directly to the transaction layer, acts to maintain the equilibrium between increases in goods and services and expansion of the money supply.

Wall Street got ahold of it and now Bitcoin is primarily acting as a Store of Value for the purpose of speculative investments. Driven primarily by the fear of missing out and market manipulation since Bitcoin is heavily centralized.

> In Bitcoin you don't generate cash, you earn block rewards for acting as a consensus broker which otherwise would require a central banking settlement layer. This activity, tied directly to the transaction layer, acts to maintain the equilibrium between increases in goods and services and expansion of the money supply.

Block rewards have no connection to transaction volume or economic activity, the protocol is designed such that bitcoin supply increases at a predictable (and diminishing) rate. Bitcoin is deflationary by design, which is one of the major issues that stopped it from becoming anything other than a speculative store of value.

> Wall Street got ahold of it and now Bitcoin is primarily acting as a Store of Value for the purpose of speculative investments

Insomuch as beanie babies are a store of value. Speculative assets only have value as long as there are more greater fools to buy in. When you've exhausted the supply of greater fools, there is no more reason to buy the speculative asset because its price won't go up, so it will fall to its intrinsic value, which is the worth of a normal stuffie for a beanie baby (roughly $5) or the worth of a number stored on other people's disks for a Bitcoin (roughly $0), which is the value ultimately stored. Wall Street is only involved in Bitcoin to facilitate trade between fools because we have collectively done a poor job of regulating this madness, allowing so many fools to eventually lose their money to a distributed Ponzi scheme and sanctioned countries.