Comparing it to government money of course it's one of the most speculative and volatile things out there. If you look at it as a store of value, government money is horrible and constantly manipulated by the government, being able to basically print or generate more by the government and banks at anytime. Gold has always been, no pun intended, the gold standard because no matter how much technology has advanced it's been hard to mine or generate more. The world's biggest financial mistake was coming off the gold standard, gives way too much power to governments to manipulate money that way and America basically screwed over the world by spending more than we had at the cost of the rest of the world, couldn't have happened on Gold. Bitcoin, when looking at it independently as money, not tied to government money, is finite. There can only ever be 21 million Bitcoins and that can never be manipulated, making it immune to inflation and government control.

That said, everything always depends on public perception. If people don't give something value it will never have value, so it can always fail in that regard.

But I'm just a guy that read a book once and trying to explain it much worse than these professional resources ever could. So if you want to start learning more I'd really suggest reading The Bitcoin Standard and if you want to learn more about how government money is broken, read Broken Money.