Except for the guarantee of uniqueness. Which is one of the most powerful invariants against corruption and government-sponsored inflation, goals which are worth these effort.
There are a few more actually: gold is one of the least putrescible materials out there (it's one of the least reactive elements available and as one of the royal metals very few acids can attack it), it has a distinctive look, and it has a very high density (most denser metals were only discovered in or after the 19th century, and are generally more valuable) which makes it easy to differentiate pure and impure golds (such as fake coinage). It also used to strike a good balance between rarity (which ensures the market won't be flooded) and availability (which actually made it usable as money).
Of course, most of this broke down as new, very productive, mines were found (e.g. in South America) and mining techniques improved. And nowadays we have the opposite issue: gold mining output declines, and is unable to follow the value growth of the world itself. This is one of the reasons why most countries moved first to fractional gold standards and then to convertible currency.
This is just a ruse used by governments as a pretext for inflation. It isn't necessary for money supply to 'keep up' with growth. As demand increases, the value of money goes up, and people simply use smaller units for exchange.
The result is exactly the same, you're just making the whole process more painful by rebadging money.
During deflation prices keep falling, which causes consumers to post-pone their purchases (tomorrow they'll be able to get that TV at a lower price so there's no point in buying it today) and investors sit on the money since they'll be more valuable tomorrow.
This is the exact opposite of inflation, which causes people to convert 'today' money into goods since tomorrow they'll buy less with it; it also causes investors to put money to good use or in interest-bearing accounts since otherwise they lose the value).
Therefore some economists argue that deflation might be even more dangerous than inflation because it discourages consumption and tends to have down-spiralling effects. (see http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/why-is-deflation... ).
Gold does not have much intrinsic value (not actually correct anymore, in our modern world gold is used quite a bit in industrial contexts): apart from being shiny, before the 19th century there wasn't much it could be used for. The vast majority of its value was extrinsic and pretty much arbitrary, in its use as part of monetary exchange systems.
The same can be said of diamond, by the way.
What are some characteristics of a good money?
It's divisible. 1 oz. of gold is equal to two 1/2 oz. of gold. Two halves of a diamond are not equal to the intact whole.
It's fungible. Gold coins of the same weight are, for all intents and purposes, the same. The same cannot be said of diamonds or oil.
It resists deterioration/decomposition. (Self-explanatory).
Its rarity/weight/volume characteristics are manageable. You can buy an iPad with a reasonably sized gold coin. The same could not be said of bushels of wheat, lead, stone, oil, etc.
It is relatively easy to identify. This provides anti-counterfeit measures out of the box.
I'm not a gold bug (I own zero gold... not even jewelry), but I do appreciate that it makes complete and total sense that it was used for money for thousands of years. Should 1 oz. of gold be worth $1500? I don't know; I don't follow the market. I do know that gold is extremely valuable due to how well it serves as a medium of exchange, and due to that fact alone.
tl;dr Gold has intrinsic value: it makes a good medium of exchange.
Diamonds, in some way, are the "anti-gold." There is a great game-theoretic reason for why something as completely worthless as diamonds make great engagement rings though: They are something expensive to the male (so he can't repeat the process of proposing very often) - but worthless to the female (so she can't be accused of being a gold digger) - and at the same time sparkly and easy to show off.
Gold is not rare either. Please re-read my comment, it's about intrinsic and extrinsic value, especially across history. Before modern industrial usages, diamond was all but useless (even worse than gold, if anything) and all of its valuation was extrinsic.
And much like gold's, diamond's intrinsic value has risen in modern times with industrial uses.
> Diamonds, in some way, are the "anti-gold."
Most definitely not. If you want anti-gold, you should look at water instead.
The value of something is how much you can get in return for the thing from a purchaser that you can find. Even "value is what we agree it is" isn't really right, it's what you can concretely get for the thing. (For instance, the fact that a certain Magic the Gathering card is listed in some book for $20 is meaningless if you can't find anyone who will give you more than $5.) There is no other definition of value that's actually useful, but there are plenty of others out there that will lead you astray.
“Yes, but the last thousand years may have been atypical.”
Using gold as a store of value is useful, otherwise we wouldn't do it.
There are post-quantum algorithms that are computable on ordinary computers, but they're still under research and they'd make Bitcoin's data set considerably larger.
Could you elaborate which aspect of bitcoin has efficient quantum algorithms? The proof-of-work system requires you to invert hashes and quantum algorithms only give you a quadratic speed up (brute force takes time O(\sqrt{size of range}) rather than O(size of range)). Right now there is no quantum attack on SHA-256 (which is what Bitcoin uses).
There are post-quantum algorithms that are computable on ordinary computers, ...
This sounds interesting, but could you elaborate? What does it mean for a post-quantum algorithm to be computable on ordinary computers?
BitCoin uses public key cryptography for its digital signatures. That in turn relies on the difficulty of factoring large numbers, for which there are efficient quantum algorithms.
The alternative is inflation (and economic instability) as soon as people start generating income by producing money for basically nothing.
While this may be true, a scarce money system does produce better result than poorly managed fiat money systems. You won't see the kind of hyperinflation that we saw in Zimbabwe with the gold standard.