[eloff]

Gold has practical applications. At minimum people are willing to pay considerable sums for it for use in personal adornments. It's also an instrument used as a hedge and traded by speculators, but there's a fundamental underlying value, that is a demand for it apart from speculation. If all the speculation stopped, the price would drop but not to zero.

Other commodities like timber have much more intrinsic value because they are mostly used, not speculated on. If people stopped speculating in the timber market there would be less liquidity but the price wouldn't change much, people still want to build things with it.

Cryptocurrency has no fundamental value, it's a digital good without practical applications and no fundamental demand. if the speculation stopped, the price would go to zero.

[ClumsyPilot]

>"[for gold] there's a fundamental underlying value"

The fundamental value for it's technical applications is probably < 1/10 of it's real value.

If people wake up tomorrow and stop using it as reserves/ investment /savings, you would loose virtually all your money, down to a few percent. So yeah, that 5% or whatever of value is secure, but how nuch does that help?

Timber is obviously not a usefull store of value because it does not last, it is not fungiable, is expensive to store - imagine 100 million dollars worth of timber, and you would store that.

[eloff]

I think this took a wrong turn. I don't aim to defend gold a store of value. It's not clear what its value would be if people stopped using it as a financial instrument, and I always advise people not to buy gold.

My point was that tangible commodities do have at least some intrinsic value, as opposed to digital commodities like cryptocurrencies.

[rabuse]

It's intrinsic value is that it's a digital asset, decentralized throughout the globe, computationally secured by mathematics, that nobody can counterfeit or spend without your key.