Gold is always used as this pillar of value when talking about currencies (one might even call it a gold standard?) but its scarcity is managed and artificially

Gold is always used as this pillar of value when talking about currencies (one might even call it a gold standard?) but its scarcity is managed and artificially inflated like anything else and it has no intrinsic value unless you really have a burning need for jewelry, electronic contacts, or I dunno, making Goldwasser? You can't eat gold. If there was some kind of huge financial crash, people would not be lining up to barter with your gold beyond a few gullible folks who think it will bring them security. It's worth something because of scarcity and prior agreement, which is exactly why paper money or cryptocurrency have value. If anything, cryptocurrency has that scarcity embedded into its very nature. That said, cryptocurrency currently isn't used for much more than speculation and "investment" which is a terrible way for a healthy economy to work. Unless there's a lot of conventional business being done with it, it's only a good investment if lots more investors come by and dump money into it, and those investors will only get a payout if proportionally more investors come after them, and so on... See a resemblance to a certain famous financial scam? It'll only be legit when people use it for exchange of goods and services in a large enough density to support the investment, which is really just a parasite on a existing economy taking advantage of pricing inefficiencies. You can't have investment and speculation first. A parasite can't live off itself. And so far the only exchange of goods and services is a few people buying psychedelics and a few people making various over-hyped decentralized apps. Oh, and a few people making ransomware. It's not very encouraging. Hopefully a truly huge decentralized application comes along that makes good, sustainable use of blockchain, but until then--it's starting to look very pyramid-shaped to me.