problem with gold is that there's a consistent 2% supply inflation per year and if gold price shoots up, Miners mine more and i'm technical innovation will inflate supply further(asteroid mining or atleast cheaper mining techniques). So if you're a gold holder, gold miners go against your value. in the long run gold is not a great investment but it is still better than most of the other stuff that can be produced easily with machines etc.
Bitcoin supply issuance is predictable and mathematically known and provable. If prices goes up, more people mining only increases the security and decentralization of the network. So if you are BTC holder, BTC miners are your friends not enemies unlike gold.
What does "actual uses" mean other than "there are people out there that have a desire to get their hands on some of it"?
In other words: things only have value because someone, somewhere is ready to exert themselves to get some.
Where that intent comes from is entirely irrelevant.
There is only one thing : supply and demand.
Where the demand comes from does not enter the conversation.
There is strictly no such thing as "intrinsic value".
Econ 101.
Econ 102: Where the demand comes from matters. Aka "substitute goods".
Gold has no convenient substitutes for the combination of ductility, corrosion resistance and electric conductance it offers, hence demand has a (high) floor.
BTC has an infinite number of convenient substitutes for its fundamental properties -- anyone can make a BTC substitute in half an hour, and there are hundreds you can buy already. So the floor on demand is the psychological buy-in -- which is not any better than the demand floor for tulip bulbs.
TBF gold doesn't really have uses outside of industrial societies.
Sure it's shiny so you can make pretty out of it (jewelry and other decorations), but for the most part it has properties: it's ridiculously stable, it's easy to work with, and it's rare enough that the supply is rather limited but not so rare that it's essentially nonexistent (unlike the platinum-group metals).
In economies which are static or very slow to grow (aka preindustrial) this makes it a convenient store of value, because it's a slowly but ever-increasing (to the approximation of your supply sinking with a ship) supply.
Outside of a few incredibly niche industrial uses that have only emerged in recent years, no one has had any need of gold except as a means of storing and exchanging value. It has been used as a store of value and as a currency throughout history and across cultures for a number of reasons, such as its recognizability (few things in nature are the same color), its difficulty in counterfeiting (gold has a number of unique properties like its density that would make it very obvious if you were trying to pull one over on a merchant), it's ease-of-use (gold is highly malleable and has a very low melting point, meaning it can easily be made into coins or bars), its rarity (supply is reasonably constrained by the difficulty of mining), its permanence (gold will not tarnish except under extreme conditions, so it's okay to leave in a vault for years on end). However an important property that also contributed is specifically gold's lack of utility - steel was very valuable in pre-industrial societies, but a pound of raw steel is worth less than the tools that could be made from that same pound of steel, so if anyone made steel coins, they wouldn't remain coins for long. If anything, the development of real uses of gold make it less desirable as a store of value - speculation artificially drives up the cost of consumer goods like electronic devices.
People need to be able to store and transfer wealth. Tools which facilitate this are valuable for being able to serve that purpose. Gold is one such tool, and a pretty good one at that.
On the flipside any currency-like concept that could come to be worth more as the raw commodity than the currency seems inherently unstable as you'd be better off using it than keeping it.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-in...
I don't have answers to the above, I think they'd be extremely hard to get, which is why I used the house vs 2 inch block of gold to illustrate there is at least a significant amount (likely the majority) of the value is ascribed rather than try to put a quantitative number on it.
BTC has some superior properties:
1. Censorship resistance / Self custody
2. Reasonably cheap to transact large value across space.
3. Network effects
Also, gold like bitcoin have a huge monetary premium so the same argument applies.
Nice dodge on the 8$ min. transaction fees :)
Also the fees are in bitcoin - if bitcoin is worthless, the fees are nothing.
If you ever send a gold bar across the world, I'll send you a beer.
I won't pay the beer with bitcoin though, to expensive for normal use, that includes conversion to euro back and forth in USD/EUR to actually use it :)
Definitely not accurate and this says nothing of the massive environmental cost of transacting on the blockchain.