> People try to compare it to things like gold for protecting your money from inflation, but that's completely nonsensical. It's just like gold. You give me yo

> People try to compare it to things like gold for protecting your money from inflation, but that's completely nonsensical. It's just like gold. You give me your gold and I'll take it all right now, saving you from losing it incrementally or at a later date. Not your vault, not your bars. Theft-as-a-Service. /s Gold has a special status because of how long we've mythologized it, but generally you'd be encouraged to invest/buy futures in things that impact your life and income directly. Your inputs and outputs. If you produce food from fertilizer and power then those are your three important commodities. Gold isn't a great fit because you can't eat it, fertilize with it, or run a tractor on it. You have to do a gold-to-dollars transaction first which can waste a fair bit of the value. If you forward packets and consume electricity to do so then holding gold also isn't economically relevant, but by trading proofs of work which were generated by burning electricity you track the value of your commodities and do so natively. If we used HashCash (or similar) to solve the initial-contact problem then we'd be creating a secondary market in the proofs and they could be used as currency by a related ecosystem like hosting providers with little friction or risk. Tulips didn't cause the problem, speculators (and scammers) did.