> gold failed as a currency in 1933, but is currently worth $1300/oz Yes, because gold is a commodity, not a currency. In fact, if you treat gold as a metal w

> gold failed as a currency in 1933, but is currently worth $1300/oz Yes, because gold is a commodity, not a currency. In fact, if you treat gold as a metal with utility similar to copper, but scale the price of copper proportionally to gold's scarcity, you get a price that is very in line with the actual current price of gold. Since copper's value comes almost entirely from its utility as a metal, this suggests that something similar is true of gold. That aside, comparing bitcoin to gold makes bitcoin look bad in multiple ways: The analogy is not good, and even if it were good, that would still be a bad thing. The linked article talks about this. > I suspect the eventual winner will be an inflationary cryptocurrency Almost certainly impossible. Proper active currency management requires anticipating the public's reaction to the management. Even if an algorithm could do that (in other words, a strong AI which is at least as good as people at understanding human psychology), if the algorithm were public, the public could/would use the algorithm to anticipate changes in currency policy, and that knowledge of the future would change what they do with their money, specifically in the direction of instability. So an open algorithm (a fundamental philosophy of crypto) is fundamentally at odds with the very notion of an actively managed money supply. The linked article talks about this too.