[ineedasername]

Gold has a variety of industrial uses as well as aesthetic value. At minimum, it's a heavy physical object, and heavy objects also have a variety of uses.

Beyond that, the less rational reasons people value gold as if it had intrinsic value are at least deeply rooted in our history & culture.

[jnordwick]

Gold isn't valued by its industrial uses. That's why gold is good as a currency, precisely because it has very limit use. With actual use comes demand based on that use, and that demand causes swings in value - what you don't want for a monetary yardstick.

Gold is gold because it is useless and also rare. And can't be produced. And spread widely. All these little features are its value because they are what you want in a currency. And the good currencies try to replicate that. It its perfect in this regard, but closer than any other phsyical item.

BTC has some of these and its properties are still in flux. And BTC is only part of the cryptofx world might wind up being the same thing financially.

> At minimum, it's a heavy physical object, and heavy objects also have a variety of uses.

Quite possibly the dumbest explanation of gold I've ever read.

[ineedasername]

Gold simply isn't actually useless though. Part of its value is derived from industrial processes-- how could it he otherwise when it is used for those things? To want to use something so expensive in price for industrial uses is pretty much by definition to value it-- at that same price-- for those uses. Why should anyone decide to use it when they say "but know, it is not worth nearly as much as that". To pay a given price for something when there are alternatives, however reluctantly and however much value & price are not quite the same thing, is to value it. No one would say "I don't value this thing and there are

Though I admit that a large portion of it's price is due to people valuing for it's properties as a financial instrument. The fact that the price would be lower if it did not have that purpose is irrelevant to valuing it at that price for other purposes. Otherwise you might say then precise thing about any other object with multiple purposes: "if not for oil being useful as fuels and instead only plastics and other pretro chemicals it's price would not be so high."

Further, I don't deny the potential for BTC or other cryptocurrencies to be used for similar financial purposes as gold, only that such uses remain theoretical, and it is uncertain whether-- given it's track record & the potential for governments to regulate it into something indistinguishable from traditional financial tools-- that it could ever achieve those uses on a wide scale. Certainly to date it has been completely useless for the financial purposes that gold currently fills. And, as this conversation started, unlike other traditional financial instruments it has absolutely no underlying asset for which it is an abstraction & which, no asset that, absent any specific financial instrument would still be utilized for its value.

It's current price is a function of two variables: 1) speculation that it's price will increase. 2) it's expected future value for the theoretical purposes already mentioned. These are abstract reasons in which it differs significantly from the concrete underlying value of traditional finance. I don't mean this as an insult. Playing video games for fun or reading books for pleasure doesn't have a separate value apart from the abstract reasons reasons for doing so either. But unlike legions of crypto advocates I don't insist on it.