[Aunche]

If you actually wanted to store value you would buy gold. You can't store value in Bitcoin because it has no inherent value. It's a distributed ledger on the internet. If I hoard 100% of the world's gold bullion, there's a good chance that people would want to buy it from me at a price similar to today's spot. If I hoard 100% of bitcoins, it loses all of its value. Moreover, if hyperinflation does occur, there's a good chance you'll face power and internet outages, which makes Bitcoin useless because you can't access it.

[imtringued]

The reason why gold is at least acceptable (as opposed to worthless) is that you cannot create another competitor element. Meanwhile Bitcoin is effectively a highly advanced piece of paper that has numbers written on it. It can be replaced by any other highly advanced piece of paper. Heck Bitcoin could even be replaced by its own clones.

[goodoldneon]

What’s gold’s inherent value?

[Aunche]

Aside from its industrial applications, it's dense, rare, chemically stable, and very easy to recognize. These are all qualities that make for a good store of value. You can't replace gold with any other element.

[strgcmc]

By this argument, you'd think we'd still be using CDs and Walkmans, instead of moving to mp3s and iPods/iPhones.

Gold will have its place as an analog store of value. But you are simply missing the point about how to evaluate a digital store of value. Think about which digital properties a digital store of value would need to have, since concepts like density and chemical stability are literally useless to evaluate a digital entity against; once you have a list of digital characteristics that define what a digital store of value would need to have, you can start to check your checklist against the properties of Bitcoin (or other cryptocurrency if you want)... I'm not saying you'll automatically be convinced, but you should at least use the right checklist to compare.

[Aunche]

Gold has obvious aesthetic and industrial uses, but as a store of value, its utility is very low to begin with. The only use for storing gold is that it could be used as an emergency medium of exchange in the event of a global economic collapse. Meanwhile, even if you had stable internet access, by some miracle, very few people would have enough spare energy to mine for blocks for Bitcoin transactions.

Outside of this extreme case, a currency is much better store of value because it comes with the bonus of liquidity. Sure fiat currency may lose its value to inflation, and Bitcoin may rise 50x, but that's actually a benefit of fiat.

Money is really just a credit for your contributions to society that society now owes back to you. The value of your contribution to society decays over time, so it makes sense that the value of your money should do so as well. You're now incentivized to "rent out" the credit society owes back to you to someone who needs it more than you, for example, a young family buying their first house. This is in essence what a loan is.

Had your money/store of value been sitting idly, it wouldn't be able to help anyone. This is the problem with Bitcoin. Loans and investment become extremely risky. It's impossible for everyone to pay back interest successfully when there are a fixed number of Bitcoins, so instead people are incentivized to hoard them. In a broader sense, by "holding value," you're holding back societal contributions for the future when these contributions could reap benefits right now. That's not something anyone should be rewarded for.

Given that storing value is a net negative for society, there's the question of where the additional value of Bitcoin is coming from. Part of it was due to the devaluation of the dollar, but that can't explain all of it. Maybe it has some unrealized potential to become a currency outside of government control, but that's something that was rejected in the original comment I replied to. This means that the value of Bitcoin is being leeched from outside. I think that people will collectively realize this, which will cause Bitcoin to crash.

[epa]

What is a tech stock's inherent value? They typically lose money and have a ton of employees. How is bitcoin different? You are investing in a technology with a group of people who are supporting it. As more people agree it is useful, the price goes up. Same thing as a stock.

[Aunche]

Tech stocks aren't stores of value either. They're investments. No matter how speculative they are, the company is expected to return its profits back to the shareholders.

[epa]

Now we are just playing with semantics.

[Aunche]

From an purchaser's perspective, Bitcoin may be indistinguishable from a meme stock, but behind the scenes it's entirely different. You can't store wealth in a company because the company requires wealth the operate.

[benhurmarcel]

> If you actually wanted to store value you would buy gold

Who actually buys gold to store value?