Let's establish some common understanding of what money actually is.

Money is historically an emergent market phenomenon establishing a commodity money, but nearly all contemporary money systems are based on fiat money. It [fiat money] derives its value by being declared by a government to be legal tender. The money supply of a country consists of currency*. (source: Wikipedia)

p2p transactions without intermediaries

based on sound money principles

permissionless to any participant in any possible role (developer, miner, user, investor, node operator, business).

Now Satoshi didn't just propose a P2P electronic cash system. he also included some incentive mechanisms and explicitly modeled the system [Bitcoin] after gold.

Satoshi writes about the proposed electronic cash system :

"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution". (source: Bitcoin whitepaper)

Satoshi writes about the incentives :

"The steady addition of a constant of amount of new coins is analogous to gold miners expending resources to add gold to circulation." (source: Bitcoin whitepaper)

Satoshi writes about the qualities :

As a thought experiment, imagine there was a base metal as scarce as gold but with the following properties:

- boring grey in colour

- not a good conductor of electricity

- not particularly strong, but not ductile or easily malleable either

- not useful for any practical or ornamental purpose



and one special, magical property:

- can be transported over a communications channel



If it somehow acquired any value at all for whatever reason, then anyone wanting to transfer wealth over a long distance could buy some, transmit it, and have the recipient sell it.



Maybe it could get an initial value circularly as you've suggested, by people foreseeing its potential usefulness for exchange. (I would definitely want some) Maybe collectors, any random reason could spark it.



I think the traditional qualifications for money were written with the assumption that there are so many competing objects in the world that are scarce, an object with the automatic bootstrap of intrinsic value will surely win out over those without intrinsic value. But if there were nothing in the world with intrinsic value that could be used as money, only scarce but no intrinsic value, I think people would still take up something.



(I'm using the word scarce here to only mean limited potential supply) (source: Bitcointalk)

I see a lot of confusion in the wider ecosystem about this topic. We've seen BTC split from Bitcoin because a sub group agreed that the soundness of the system (e.g. "Don't trust. Verify." is more important than the cash aspect [P2P transactions].

Now I see quite a few "BCH supporters" who value the P2P cash aspect over the soundness of the underlying system. The IFP proposal is just one such expression of misunderstanding the two-sided intention stated by Satoshi in the whitepaper.

Money in its essence is sound. Actual money is a commodity agreed upon by the majority in an emergent process. It is the constant abuse of power of a smart (or deceitful) minority in human history that gained tremendously at the expense of the majority by making money unsound.

What is at stake here is not just the soundness of money. Actual money is so hard under (men-in-the-middle) attack from so many different factions in society seeking control over others that it is threatened with extinction before even seeing the light of the world. We haven't had real money at large scale for a long long time if at all. Let's not fuck this up.

Money is either both sound and money or neither sound nor money.

(*)cryptocurrency is a misnomer if we follow this line of thinking.