[1] https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/28/bitcoin-is-evil...
As an aside, the US had active monetary policy for about a century, and it has enjoyed plenty of bubbles and crashes. Some of those were worsened by monetary policy (e.g. easy money in the early 1920's swapped to deflationary monetary policy in 1929 as soon as the easy money bubble popped, low interest rates fueling real estate speculation in the early 2000's, etc.)
In this case, he does not understand how Bitcoin can be a store of value, because it is not backed by a government. How come gold or any other commodity has value? Value it what the market decides, not the government. He obviously did not understand the intrinsic value the technology provides, which previous media of exchange do not provide, such as immutability and full control of funds. He is happy to pass judgment without understanding the technology.
I don't think you understand the definition of intrinsic value -- it has nothing to do with being physical:
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/intrinsicvalue.asp
Key quote: "The intrinsic value is the actual value of a company or an asset based on an underlying perception of its true value including all aspects of the business, in terms of both tangible and intangible factors.
A good thought experiment for whether something has intrinsic value is: would <thing> still be useful if nobody else on the planet wanted it? A share in a business would continue paying out dividends, and would absolutely be useful. A dollar bill would be useless (especially if it's an electronic dollar). A bitcoin would also be absolutely useless.
Actually it has the best monetary policy: it's supply is inherently regulated and prescribed: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_supply. Intellectual-yet-idiot Krugman is a Kardashian of the economic's world. Popular because he is popular, nothing more.
"Economists" should take a note from the medical profession: First do no harm. AKA unless there is a extraordinarily compelling motivation, the best course of action is no action. We have spent the last 100 years in a system where the very base layer of our economy, the currency, was cooped for social engineering. "Wouldn't we all be better off if we made the cost of lending almost 0?" -> Housing bubble. If Wizard's of Oz are constantly mutating the value of money and lending the only people who can prosper are the Wizards (politicians) and the Bankers. The last 50 years of economic prosperity make that evident.