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by moduspol
3064 days ago
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It seems unnecessarily reductive to claim that gold can have no valid alternatives, yet Bitcoin has no value because anyone can create an alternative. I can start trying to use aluminum to hold value. It has intrinsic value through valid non-currency applications. Being able to do so in no way lessens the value of gold, and the ability to do the same thing with virtually any other material does not mean gold's effective intrinsic value is approximately zero. It's the other factors you mentioned (robust market and long history of usage) that makes gold valuable relative to alternatives, and Bitcoin has factors that make it more valuable relative to other cryptocurrencies--including forks of Bitcoin. It's true that it is more likely Bitcoin is replaced by another crypto than gold replaced by another metal, but that's a far cry from Bitcoin's effective intrinsic value being approximately zero. |
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Gold has been out of fashion for currencies for many decades, especially since Bretton Woods; despite that gold had continued to be valuable because it has practical use, which is what people generally mean by intrinsic value, and definitely what dr_win meant.
It's not impossible that tomorrow you will invent some aluminum alloy that is way better than gold for jewelry, although it's certainly unlikely. But it would be very easy for someone to start offering yet another pseudocurrency that allows for "interesting digital infrastructure", which is what dr_win claimed was Bitcoin's intrinsic value.
Gold's demand is large and stable and it's supply is constrained. Bitcoin's demand as digital infrastructure is both small and unproven, and the supply appears bounded only by the number of hucksters in the world and the bytes of storage that they hucksters can command. That means that for dr_win's theory of intrinsic value, Bitcoin's should tend toward zero.