Bitcoin is the control experiment that economics never had. Strip away the institutional scaffolding. Remove the government backing. Eliminate the legal tender laws.

What is left?
What is the bedrock of monetary value when everything conventional is removed?
The answer, observable in real time across sixteen years of data, is this: a network of sufficient size, secured by sufficient thermodynamic cost, recording a perfectly invariant ledger, generates value as a natural consequence of its existence. Value is not a convention.
It is an emergent property of a specific class of network structure.