[wpietri]

I didn't say "has no valid alternatives". I just said it's hard. Gold is a specific element with specific characteristics that make it uniquely valuable for jewelry, electronics, and other industrial uses.

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.