I’m not sure it’s fair to conclude the price doesn’t match its industrial usage, just based on being an integral component of computers and smart phones, using another electrical conductor while possible would lead to reduced lifetimes of devices...so what is the fair value of something that in other words extends the lifetimes of these devices?

Also, I’d be the first person to acknowledge and promote the function of bitcoin and blockchain technologies too, but I think it’s ok to support bitcoin/blockchain while simultaneously questioning how the monetary value of bitcoin is derived and drawing a distinction between value/worth/function of precious metals and cryptocurrencies. It’s like smart contracts, I’m the first to support and promote self executing programs hosted on blockchains, but I’m also the first to challenge when people market them as functioning outside the legal system or in other ways inconsistent with reality.

I say if you can, own a little of all of them, sheep too. After all gold is only worth something until it’s worth less than a can of soup.

Price can be based both on utility and speculation, so shiny metals may have higher prices than their industrial usage would imply. It doesn’t have to be just one or the other.

A store of value is, of course, useful, but that doesn’t mean that it should gain a high price. Is there a shortage of value storage, or are there already plenty of ways to store value?

Doesn't bitcoin match that definition? It is not only a store of value but also provides forms of utility that wasn't there before distributed consensus was solved.

It doesn't store value, it's a network protocol and a database.

It's not rare, and the supply was minted for substantially minimal energy/capital input. Satoshi designed an economic model for Bitcoin to reward himself and the small pool of users who ran the software. Anyone buying a Bitcoin for more than it cost to produce it in 2009-2014 is hoping they'll find a greater fool to sell their coin to.

Is litecoin a store of value? Monero a store of value too? Maybe 42 coin is more valuable because there's only 42 instead of "21 million"... oops the network forked and now there's twice... wait four times... wait the network forked again... oh dear.

Are you saying a database doesn't have value? For many companies, their database is their largest asset.

> It doesn't store value, it's a network protocol and a database. It's not rare, and the supply was minted for substantially minimal energy/capital input.

I don't agree with any of that.

I suppose the internet is really just a bunch of 1s and 0s and not of any value either using that reasoning.