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Comment by cowtools | Hacker News Reader

Gold is useful in chemical and industrial processes. Bitcoin obviously has no use other than money, so I don't know if they are completely comparable in this sense.

If people decided that gold was not valuable as money, it would retain at least some value based on its usefulness alone.

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Thought-provoking post, but this is an argument I just don't get. Oxygen and CO2 are useful in chemical and industrial processes too. If you want something more limited, then Aluminium. That's the value Gold will retain if people decided it was of no use as long-term money. Gold's use in industry has very little to do with its value. What am I missing?

I consider Bitcoin’s use only as money to be a good thing for Bitcoin. It has no competing uses, thus has ultimate comparative advantage as money. The best monies throughout history had no competing consumption uses.

An interesting idea. I think digital and paper currency[0] are the obvious competitors however, so it isn't uniquely the ultimate comparative advantage.

[0] Ok, I guess you can burn paper money or use it as a chair, I think Weimar hyperinflation had examples of that…

What makes you think having no competing uses is an advantage?

This is an oft-cited example, but if you look at the numbers, the industrial demand is mostly insignificant. If for some reason people lost interest in gold as a store of value, the industrial market would be so oversaturated that the gold price would likely be very nearly zero.

Its has other uses, like Microsofts decentralized identity or document vérification storage

does it? If you simply fork bitcoin, won't you also get those properties?

Yes. Just like if you fork the amazon website you become amazon.

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