An important difference: gold and diamonds have significant non-financial use. The majority of gold mined each year, for example, goes to jewelry and industrial use. And the track record for that demand runs back millennia.
There was a time when we hadn't the technology to produce aluminium in significant quantities like we do in today's factories, and it was more expensive than gold. And for that reason, it was used in jewellery, expensive cutlery and even the Washington monument.
Gold is mostly valuable for its scarcity and the way our culture has used scarce metals as a store of value, not because of its intrinsic value as a metal.
Today we can create artificial scarce tokens digitally, before using a centralised party to manage the ledger, today in a decentralised manner. Who knows whether gold's status will last, or in fact bitcoin's. Perhaps the noble notion of decentralisation won't be valued by markets in the end, perhaps there's no reason to respect one token's value for its scarcity when you can programmatically create a million clones on a single computer.
I've been a bitcoin enthusiast for half a decade, but the past few years I've seen a major decline in genuine interest in bitcoin other than as a get rich quick scheme. We used to have lots of cool and fun things going on, now it's bland and boring. People forget bitcoin's only value is its decentralised nature, yet the price increases don't reflect any significant growth in capturing the value of decentralisation, at all.
There are many valuable things that are not made into jewelry. There are metals that are more valuable than gold, but they are not as commonly used in jewelry because they aren't as aesthetically appealing. Gold was used for making beautiful things in cultures that did not treat it as money. It became valued because it was uniquely workable, beautiful, and durable.
Part of gold's value is its rarity, certainly. But another part of it is utility. If investor demand for gold collapsed, it would still be valued.
You seem to ignore the simple fact that as demand grows for a limited resource, the price grows. So even if the "value" of bitcoin viz a viz decentralization has remained constant, its market cap goes up because demand has exploded.
Thus, it is not the actual properties that make them desirable as jewelry. It is solely the fact that they are valuable that people want them for jewelry.
If the price of gold was to collapse tomorrow, it's use in jewellery would continue without pause.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/299603/gold-demand-by-se...
Jewelry is definitely not just a fancier way to store gold. How many people do you know that sold their wedding rings when prices spiked?
I don't think intrinsic value is a meaningful term. Gold has been valued for millennia because it is very useful for making pretty things. And the price has been high for a long time because the supply of it is low.
I don't know how to read this other than as stating the same thing with different words, i.e. "tracking inflation" is just another way of saying that its valuable.
Scarcity was necessary, for sure. But definitely not sufficient.