It needs to be useful for something other than just "being a store of value". Gold 'works' as well as it does because there's at least something tying it down to market fundamentals. You can make jewelry out of it, you can coat electrical contacts with it. There's reasons besides collective psychology that gold is worth something particular which isn't $0.
A digital asset like Bitcoin has nothing tying it down to market fundamentals at all unless there's something else to do with it. It's a disconnected number flapping about in the wind. And as we've observed, since the value people ascribe to a Bitcoin is entirely psychological, the price can do anything. I'm not storing my value in anything I can't be fairly certain will have similar or greater value in the future. A Bitcoin that could be used as a currency would have some inherent value, because being able to use something as currency is valuable.
Something has to be at least a little useful for its value to be reliable. (Having a trusted organization, which you expect to be around for a long time, that promises to exchange it for something useful counts as being useful itself.)
> Gold 'works' as well as it does because there's at least something tying it down to market fundamentals. You can make jewelry out of it, you can coat electrical contacts with it.
In the earlier phases of Gold as a store of value I'd agree that it having additional uses were a bonus but now when an institution be it private or governmental purchases millions of gold as assets for a SoV then this usage is inconsequential.
Gold used to be volatile but now is a stable store of value, it retains this because the market decides a fair price, gold can theoretically go to zero, it's just had hundreds of years to achieve a more stable price/value.
> since the value people ascribe to a Bitcoin is entirely psychological
This is totally true of gold too, it's just embedded more into society as an element that has value.
> A Bitcoin that could be used as a currency would have some inherent value, because being able to use something as currency is valuable
It's cheaper and faster for me to send BTC between US/EU, volatility is an issue of course.
> Something has to be at least a little useful (or else backed up by a trusted organization) for its value to be reliable.
I'm not sure many of the 'trusted' organizations are that trustworthy, look at the 2007 crash, massively over leveraged assets with complex rules/instruments and collusion (that resulted in the UK with no one being prosecuted).
There a few ways where I see BTC having an advantage as a SoV over gold.
* Portability (transferring any amount of BTC is limited only by transaction cost).
* Scarcity (The number of BTC is capped at 21 million ever on the network, gold will still be found and mined).
* Divisible (BTC can be divided to small amounts that would make it more useful for smaller purchases where gold is not practicable).
>In the earlier phases of Gold as a store of value I'd agree that it having additional uses were a bonus but now when an institution be it private or governmental purchases millions of gold as assets for a SoV then this usage is inconsequential.
Nearly 70% of the demand for gold is for jewelry, electronics, and other non-financial/SoV applications. The market value of gold is dominated by its practical and aesthetic uses.
Well, 30% of the market value of gold is from financial/SoV-type use cases! That's not insignificant. Because of the psychological consensus that gold is a decent place to store value - it's been one for several thousand years, you can reasonably assume that someone's still going to take it a few decades from now - that portion of its value fluctuates substantially depending on how interested people are in a literally solid and relatively-stable physical asset. So when people are uncertain about other investment prospects, they go to gold, because it's basically one step up from stuffing cash under your mattress insofar as gold is less subject to inflation.
Crypto is ... currently, at least, not where you go if you want something with a reliable, stable value.
And yeah, I think aesthetic value counts! It's also very much a psychological thing, and it's undeniably tied into a similar "I think this is valuable because other people will see it and think it looks valuable" loop; if gold were much cheaper, we wouldn't see as much gold jewelry. But it's also genuinely one of the better metals to make jewelry out of (doesn't corrode, ductile, nobody's allergic to it) and it's quite a pretty color. It's more fickle than industrial use, sure, but it's also much less fickle than investor speculation.
Not looking to argue with you as it seems like you have an idea stuck to your mind. But bitcoin/crypto is very useful to tax evasion, capital flight, criminal organizations, scams, speculative trading, wealth transfer, and other stuff.
There are plenty of people who use fiat currencies that are almost useless outside of their own nations borders, with extremely bad exchange rates. This basically binds a person to one country and hinders movement and prosperity.
Look at what the OP was saying, he was only listing negative things and attributing them all to something BTC excels at. I was saying that fiat is hardly a paragon of virtue :)
Only 10% of the price of gold is "tied down" to it's real world usage. The other 90% is psychological.
So gold - 90% psychological
Bitcoin - 100% psychological
If you don't believe in psychological value, both are about as bad. I'm pretty sure no investment gold holder will be happy if gold price drops down to "tied down" value.
Actually, 70% of the price of gold is tied down to its real world usage. I was surprised too - I actually thought it was only around 10% when I made that comment.
But what I was referring to was that simply having some significant non-psychological value was key for giving people the stability and confidence to invest more value in it. In which case, the difference between 10% non-psychological value and 0% non-psychological value is something on the order of an infinity percent relative difference.
A digital asset like Bitcoin has nothing tying it down to market fundamentals at all unless there's something else to do with it. It's a disconnected number flapping about in the wind. And as we've observed, since the value people ascribe to a Bitcoin is entirely psychological, the price can do anything. I'm not storing my value in anything I can't be fairly certain will have similar or greater value in the future. A Bitcoin that could be used as a currency would have some inherent value, because being able to use something as currency is valuable.
Something has to be at least a little useful for its value to be reliable. (Having a trusted organization, which you expect to be around for a long time, that promises to exchange it for something useful counts as being useful itself.)