[smt88]

> gold has no value to typical people.

The whole point of an economy is that something has value if it's valuable to someone, not just the person who's holding it.

I'm not going to use a chunk of gold for anything, but it has intrinsic uses that aren't tied to being an exchange of value. It can be used to make jewelry, electronics, food, and medical devices. In some of those applications, there is no substitute for gold.

Contrast that with Bitcoin, whose only value is speculative (whether people think it will increase in price). It has literally no other use or value. If the internet crashed, you couldn't sell your Bitcoin to someone to make jewelry out of it.

[hackingforfun]

Bitcoin is already valuable to someone, maybe not you, but someone (in fact, quite a lot of people). Many of the people that consider that Bitcoin has value don't care about gold at all, some do, some don't. By the way, these same people that don't care about gold also could give a shit less that gold can be made into jewelry (or anything else). Like you said, something has value because it's valuable to someone. I think what people need to accept is that Bitcoin, right now, is valuable to a lot of people. If the internet crashed, there's going to be much bigger problems, including accessing and transferring fiat currency. What people like about Bitcoin is that you can't print more of it without forking it, or creating your own new crypto with different rules (in contrast to potentially infinite printing and borrowing of USD). To create a viable alternative to Bitcoin (via fork or otherwise), you have to market and create the same level of trust, and convince everyone who trusts Bitcoin now to switch over.

[foolfoolz]

bitcoin has the same utility as paper money. that doesn’t mean it has no value