[mattnewton]

That’s still far more uses than if people think a particular coin has lost its value. When thinking about a store of value for loss-averse people, the intrinsically useful, always-been-valuable mineral I can hold in my hand seems like a psychological winner over numbers in a blockchain that require an industrial society with the blockchain to keep churning. My take was that people were speculating in bitcoin to get rich, not to weather government collapse.

[wbl]

Iron is much more useful. It also requires more energy to extract.

[kazen44]

iron is far more abundant though.

[nostrademons]

The price of a commodity depends more on the energy, labor, and technology required to extract it and consequent market power of the main producers than on its abundance in the earth's crust. Otherwise strontium ($1000/kg, 360 ppm in crust) would be a lot cheaper than tin ($16/kg, 2.2 ppm).