[yapcguy]

Not really true.

We could fork the software and call it something else. Maybe change the hashing algorithm and the hard limit on the maximum number of coins, like Litecoin did. Trivial to do. There is no intrinsic difference between a Bitcoin or a Litecoin except they are used on different networks and have a different name.

By contrast, precious metals have inherent properties determined by nature. Gold is inert, it has never been recreated by man synthetically, which is what makes it so precious.

[GigabyteCoin]

That's already happened. The bitcoin software has been forked thousands of times and there are hundreds of alt coins out there currently.