The success of Bitcoin has led me to think that perhaps its concept of value is not wholly new, but rather illuminates how money has worked all along. All my l

The success of Bitcoin has led me to think that perhaps its concept of value is not wholly new, but rather illuminates how money has worked all along. All my life, explanations of why gold is valuable have all boiled down to more intellectually nuanced versions of "Ooh, Shiny." But I suggest that gold is agreed to have value because of two traits it has which can be seen as analogous to traits of Bitcoin. First, worked gold items like coins and jewelry represent a certain measurable and comprehensible amount of work. Not too much and not too little, in terms of available labor resources. Second (as I learned from the TV show Connections), the purity of a nugget of gold can be quickly estimated to a high confidence level by rubbing it on the smooth surface of a black basalt river rock. The deepness of the yellow of the streak on the rock immediately shows the quality of the sample. So I believe gold is agreed to have value because to our ancestors gold artefacts demonstrated a certain amount of work invested, and the quality of those artefacts could be quickly evaluated with an efficient "proof of work" algorithm. Why does "proof of work"=value in the Bitcoin ecosystem? In part because it guarantees a cap on inflation (thus preserving value while allowing appreciation), in part because dedicating valuable resources to mining represents a vote of confidence in the system. I believe the simplest explanation for why gold has value is that there is nothing new under the sun, and analogous reasons applied when gold first came into use in human trading systems.