[cowtools]

I agree with your point, but consider the following:

1: Cryptocurrencies can still operate over distributed mesh networks or sneaker-nets in a semi-doomsday scenario.

2: With gold, it is difficult to verify its authenticity vs some impostor alloy without the necessary tech/knowledge.

Edit: the bottom line is that in a doomsday scenario, people have little use for bitcoins or shiny yellow rocks.

[ludston]

You can verify gold with a vessel of water, an already verified piece of gold and a set of scales. It's taught in story form to primary age children with the famous quote "Eureka I found it!"

[datadata]

For daily transactions at the current gold price, it would be extremely hard to do this sort of measurement that way with any precision without very specialized equipment. A gram of gold (around $60) is a reasonable daily transaction size and has a volume of 0.05ml. In order to distinguish metals of similar densities, you'd have to be able to measure just a fraction of that volume accurately. Maybe there is some clever system to scale this down, but wasn't obvious to me.

[ludston]

Well one historic way of doing this, was instead of trading directly in minute quantities of gold, people would store larger amounts of gold in a bank and trade contracts that represent certain fractions of what is stored. This was called "currency".

[cowtools]

Interesting point. I don't have any comment, but it looks like this guy disagrees with you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31933490

[nradov]

We have never seen a distributed mesh network that worked correctly in the real world at scale. The OLPC project tried doing that but ran into severe technical problems. So it's not necessarily impossible, but I simply don't believe we will have an operating mesh network in that scenario.

https://wiki.laptop.org/go/Mesh_Network_Details