Gold is only a store of value, even less so than Bitcoin. With Bitcoin I can actually buy things, both via e-commerce and locally if I am motivated enough to.

Gold is only a store of value, even less so than Bitcoin. With Bitcoin I can actually buy things, both via e-commerce and locally if I am motivated enough to. If I walked around with a bunch of gold coins I would have a harder time. Cashing out is even more difficult (as someone who grew up in California's gold country and knew many a gold bug, it involves humans and haggling). The difference, of course, is that gold used to be currency, then was the backing for currency, but then that was abstracted away. Bitcoin essentially replaces rare-earth mining with it's own, in theory "repairing" this abstraction with cryptography. The total value of gold ever mined is about $8 Trillion, something like 50 times more than Bitcoin. There's probably a lot more value just stored in gold that isn't being exchanged every day for goods and services than the total market cap of Bitcoin.