> You can sell your gold bar, and you can sell your private key. I see them as the same and no, I don't own Bitcoins.

If there's no support network for your bitcoins, their value is 0, exactly. Even if you assume people stop caring for shiny imputrescible metals, its intrinsic property (of being shiny and imputrescible) pretty much ensures there will always be some demand for gold, and thus it will keep a non-zero price. Possibly low, but not actually zero.

I would say, the intrinsic property of gold is insignificant. Other metals which are naturally more abundant and in a usable shape would have more value, in other words, probably you would get more money by selling your monitor stand than a gold bar, if gold were to lose its scarcity.

But what does it matter which one has a larger "intrinsic value"? Both prices are determined more by speculation and group consciousness.

It matters because one is a physical object with static properties and the other is a digital abstraction with characteristics that can change arbitrarily based on network consensus. One is fundamentally a thing that can be looked at and held, the other isn't even a thing you can know you have without consulting a quorum of nodes about the status of the ledger (for all you know, you don't actually own any tokens because an attacker has stolen them)

But what does that matter in a world where people spend numbers on a bank account, never questioning if the money is actually there or not? I fear you are putting too much emphasis on physical things, as if the quality of being "able to be touched" somehow matters in the modern world.

And? So what? A bank account is nothing like gold either so that statement is totally meaningless in the context of this thread.

> But what does it matter which one has a larger "intrinsic value"?

It matters a lot of part of the reason to invest in them is as a hedge against general collapse of social institutions.

But are you really hedging against the collpase of _everything_ so that we are at a completely primative level. Or do we mean collapse as in another collapse of the world economy?

If you mean the former, then yes, gold is a good hedge. But if you mean the latter, then I would argue Bitcoin beats gold 100x.

> But are you really hedging against the collpase of _everything_ so that we are at a completely primative level. Or do we mean collapse as in another collapse of the world economy?

The world economy has never collapsed, and if it did, it would be equivalent to the first option.

If you mean a short-term market downturn like the one that occurred with the ~2009 financial crisis, why would I even bother to hedge against that—and, if I did, why would I use an asset with high volatility to hedge against short-term market movement?

I think the parent comment is implying that in a worst case scenario bitcoin will be 0 but gold will still be greater than 0.

During such times you need an asset whose value will be greater than 0.

Just look at the gold price over the past 100 years, even the last 10-15 years have seen an modest increase. It will only go up & it is highly unlikely that it won't ever be perceived as the asset compared to other precious metals.

> Just look at the gold price over the past 100 years

Or 2,000 years:

"the researchers look at pay for a Roman legionary, in the era of Emperor Augustus (27 B.C.-14 A.D.), who was paid a salary equivalent to 2.31 ounces of gold. A centurion was paid a salary equivalent to 38.58 ounces of gold.

Compared to modern US Army salaries, a private is making 20% more than the legionary, and a captain is making 30% less than the centurion" [1].

A counterpoint can be found in silver, where unexpected Spanish silver production in the New World prompted inflation around the world [2][3].

TL; DR For historical reasons, gold is grandfathered into our collective consciousness.

[1] http://www.mining.com/what-a-roman-centurions-pay-says-about...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/mar/21/story-of-citi...

[3] http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/chinawh/web/s5/s5_4.html