What's funny about this comment is that literally every extent currency in the world is a fork of gold.

Yes, but unlike Dogecoin, those currencies have an army, a navy, and a tax collection office to give them value.

I read a comment on Reddit where some people were speculating about the future of their coin. (This is a coin with "masternodes" that vote on how to spend a discretionary mining tax.) They speculated that one day they might vote to hire mercenaries to protect the coin's value.

At the point that you need to hire mercenaries to protect your coin's value, why not just use them to rob people, or extort protection payments?

I don't know, and I'm not sure how mercenaries would affect the coin's value, but the thought is scary, and it offers a potential counterpoint to the comment about coins not having militaries giving them value.

FWIW, China was on silver

if you fork bitcoin you don't make more bitcoin, a forked bitcoin coin isn't exchangeable with the original, bitcoin value is in the community who reconize it as an asset, how you say, people recognize gold as an asset. Except history bitcoin has many other advantages to gold, and history is not that huge argument, times change.