Couldn't you say the same thing about gold? It manages to survive.

Good point. I don't have a strong refutation of it. The main advantage of bitcoin over gold is that you can transfer it anywhere in the world to a potential anonymous recipient, which is why its main success stories so far have been in shady businesses. The current main advantage(s) of gold over bitcoin is it's still a lot easier for the average person worldwide to acquire and sell it, cultural tradition, there's been a few recessions where gold has at least held firm so it's trusted as a store of value.

So if bitcoin's competition is Gold (and not your local currency) it would need to get a lot easier for laymen to acquire and sell (I'm not just talking bay area engs, I mean like the Venezuelan farmers, which is why bitcoin enthusiasts trump up any and all reports of the like). The segwit x2 fork was at least an attempt at that, and coinbase has done good work reducing frictions. The 2nd and 3rd will take years but could happen.

I just feel like at this point all of bitcoins gains in the past year have been driven by wild speculators looking to make a quick buck, which tells me that when the recession hits they will dump their holding and btc will tank. This will make people less confident in btc as a store of value, and will consider it instead to be a wildly risky investment vehicle, which it is. At that point, it will default to its only proven use case thus far: anonymous worldwide financial transactions.

disclaimer: I have a smallish % of my portfolio in both gold and btc.

> The current main advantage(s) of gold over bitcoin is it's still a lot easier for the average person worldwide to acquire and sell it

I don't think this is true at all? All I have to do to acquire Bitcoin is sign up for an account at an exchange, link my bank account, and then hit the buy button. It's exactly as easy to acquire as stocks.

Contrast with physical gold, which I wouldn't know where to acquire.

In the third world, quite a lot of people don’t have a bank account, or at least not a conventional one as we would understand them. A common alternative is M-Pesa, which is phone based, and I don’t mean smartphone: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa

It's very true for most people, especially in the third world. And you can do exactly what you described for e-gold as well.