They've already noted that:
> people's perception of its value will change
But as they say, a gold bar will remain a gold bar, until and unless it is actively destroyed. Not so for bitcoins, which only remain so as long as they're actively maintained (not just individual coins but the mining networks which allows the creation of new transactions)
This doesn’t sound super useful, but it sounds about as useful as a bar of gold in a world where nobody considers gold to be valuable.
AFAIK there is no mechanism for the difficulty of new blocks to fall. And if the only use is creating transactions between yourself and yourself, well you can also collect gravel.
> This doesn’t sound super useful, but it sounds about as useful as a bar of gold in a world where nobody considers gold to be valuable.
Even in a sub-industrial context and ignoring pretty much all of human history and assuming your gold has lost all of its extrinsic worth, your bar of gold could be molded or cast into plenty of useful things (light reflectors, heat shields, baubles, weights). Bitcoins, not so much.
Nah, if civilization collapses then you'll still be able to use your bar of gold to bash in someone's skull and steal their canned beans (which, in the grim solar-flare induced darkness of 2020, will be worth their weight in bitcoins).
At least when you give a person a gold bar, you know that they now have the gold bar.
If there's no support network for your bitcoins, their value is 0, exactly. Even if you assume people stop caring for shiny imputrescible metals, its intrinsic property (of being shiny and imputrescible) pretty much ensures there will always be some demand for gold, and thus it will keep a non-zero price. Possibly low, but not actually zero.
During such times you need an asset whose value will be greater than 0.
It matters a lot of part of the reason to invest in them is as a hedge against general collapse of social institutions.
If you mean the former, then yes, gold is a good hedge. But if you mean the latter, then I would argue Bitcoin beats gold 100x.
The world economy has never collapsed, and if it did, it would be equivalent to the first option.
If you mean a short-term market downturn like the one that occurred with the ~2009 financial crisis, why would I even bother to hedge against that—and, if I did, why would I use an asset with high volatility to hedge against short-term market movement?
Or 2,000 years:
"the researchers look at pay for a Roman legionary, in the era of Emperor Augustus (27 B.C.-14 A.D.), who was paid a salary equivalent to 2.31 ounces of gold. A centurion was paid a salary equivalent to 38.58 ounces of gold.
Compared to modern US Army salaries, a private is making 20% more than the legionary, and a captain is making 30% less than the centurion" [1].
A counterpoint can be found in silver, where unexpected Spanish silver production in the New World prompted inflation around the world [2][3].
TL; DR For historical reasons, gold is grandfathered into our collective consciousness.
[1] http://www.mining.com/what-a-roman-centurions-pay-says-about...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/mar/21/story-of-citi...
There are other ways though: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058150/