I'll provide counter arguments to these statements. > 1. Unlike gold, Bitcoin can cease to exist. If nobody keeps the blockchain alive, it doesn't exist any mo

I'll provide counter arguments to these statements. > 1. Unlike gold, Bitcoin can cease to exist. If nobody keeps the blockchain alive, it doesn't exist any more. Try to make gold disappear from the ground! To kill the blockchain, one would have to destroy every single copy. Try finding all of the thousands of copies of the blockchain archives around the world and make them disappear. > 2. Unlike gold, the operators can decide to increase supply. Or reduce it. By orders of magnitude. It's a code change. Try that with gold. The "operators" cannot arbitrarily decide to increase supply. It would require a coordinated effort by developers, miners, exchanges and other node operators. As past attempts to hardfork the bitcoin blockchain have shown, this is extraordinarily difficult. The value of gold can theoretically be decreased by orders of magnitude which is effectively the same thing as increasing supply. Through a coordinated effort by buyers and sellers the value of gold could decrease 10x tomorrow. This is also extraordinarily difficult. > 3. Forks are abundant. Good luck trying to invent a new element. Yes. Bitcoin is different than gold in this respect. I would argue this is one of the advantages that digital currency has over a physical currency. Forks encourage innovation. A fork of Bitcoin does not affect the main chain. > 4. The economical benefit of Bitcoins is much too small to explain the energy use. It can't even keep up with the transaction count of a small town. The energy expenses can only be justified by expected future return. This is actually where Bitcoin is somewhat comparable to gold as a valuable. It's just that gold actually has real-world uses besides acting as currency. So we know the price for gold won't go to zero. Unless of course we find ways to defy our current physics! The market disagrees with your first statement. If there is no real economic benefit to Bitcoin, then the market has been operating irrationally for many years. While this is possible, it is becoming increasingly difficult to justify a conclusion that the market is irrational. Bitcoin also has "real-world" uses besides currency. There are timestamping functions and tokenization protocols that provide a benefit beyond currency. These are all digital uses, but very real.