Believing in the gold standard is disbelieving in capitalism This betrays a deep ignorance of capitalism. It's not about "making money", but rather about excha

Believing in the gold standard is disbelieving in capitalism This betrays a deep ignorance of capitalism. It's not about "making money", but rather about exchange. The two parties in an exchange both expect (and usually gain) greater value afterwards. Capitalism means "private ownership of the means of production", where the "means of production" are the capital goods. Money or "financial capital" is just one possible facet of capital. Strictly speaking, there is no money creation out of economic activity, outside either: gold mining (when you have a gold standard) or monetary expansion via the fractional reserve mechanism. What is made is: goods, services and capital for future investment. People eventually want goods & services rather than money itself. And even those who seek money as an end in itself are in fact trading valuable services for pieces of paper (or whatever form money has in that instance). Now, as for the argument that bitcoins are "pointless busywork that produces nothing of real value" the value comes from having a robust and forgery-secure digital token. Whether it's good enough to be used as money remains to be seen. Bitcoin is still more or less a proof-of-concept. Even if the underlying foundations, like SHA256 are found flawed, it remains a valid scheme for p2p crypto-tokens, with different crypto primitives.