The entirety of mined gold, over the history of mankind, wouldn't fill an Olympic swimming pool. It has become exponentially more difficult to mine, and can't b

The entirety of mined gold, over the history of mankind, wouldn't fill an Olympic swimming pool. It has become exponentially more difficult to mine, and can't be created outside of alchemy (e.g. some radioactive processes). Gold has a comparable price to platinum, and is positively cheap compared to rhodium. Gold has been valued by pretty much every civilization throughout history, independently and for the same reasons, even before its unique properties gave it secondary value. I don't invest in gold, have little of it, and I don't know how this strawman got erected, but gold has a much better case than cryptocurrencies at having a so-called intrinsic value. On the cryptocurrency side there are literally thousands of active offerings, and the barrier to entry to create one or a hundred more is negligible. They offer incredibly little value (outside of crime), and are largely illiquid with enormous transaction costs at every step. The transaction history of cryptocurrencies if aggregated would be 99.999+% trading and gambling, with a rounding error of transactions for illicit purposes. And a minuscule amount of early-adopter, feel-good "look I used it to buy a pizza" legitimate transactions. As to your last line, that's another strawman and certainly isn't the argument I'm making. What I am saying is that no cryptocurrency currently in play has any legitimate intrinsic value, and because of that the trading of the same is effectively a game of chicken where everyone waits to see who blinks. There is a non-zero chance that Bitcoin could crash to effectively $0 in a short period.