Crypto assets CAN be a storage of value alongside gold and silver.
I’ll start by saying that, as all good science, I’m making assumptions, arbitrary, out of my pants, assumptions.
Gold, has value, in very small percentage for its use as metal (it’s the best electrical conductor, AFAIK), and mostly for been the winner in the up_to_the_20th century race for been the world financial storage of value. Now WHAT or WHICH value? As I research (aka googled) into this, mostly the value of WORK (unit Joules), according to MY physics, applied or I rather say manifested energy (:potential to do work, unit also Joules). In the mechanical sense, Force per distance (Joule = Newton x meter), I’m still looking into how this translate to OUR current tech (¿computational work?), but I haven’t had the time to look more into it, feel free to correct/ add to this part.
Back to gold as storage of energy. But that’s just an arbitrary decision, you cannot convert, unless you know some alchemical secret, gold back into energy. I know, maybe in the future, but NOW, we can’t. You CAN however get someone to put energy to do some work for you for that gold. Compared it to OIL, the black gold, which use energy to be produced, and can be converted to energy, and its actually the main source of energy consumed in technology during the 20th century.
That make, ANYTHING we as society or our representatives agree or decide that is the storage of the value of or work, or our energy.
Now ENERGY, the 20th century greatly developed our dependency on chemical and electrical energy, petroleum and all other forms of electrical energy production. And with the advancement of our technology mechanical it’s no longer the sole useful and preferred use of energy, now direct use of electrical energy in electronics circuits, for computational (calculations), data storage and other uses, the information age as its was called in the 90s I think. No those Joules I haven’t found how to measure them, but we can measure the Watts consumed by ours electronic systems, and Watts are Joules per second (J/s), so THEREs energy used to do electrical or computational work.
All that said, it means that cryptocurrencies, take for example, Bitcoin (BTC), which are the result of computational work CAN be used as digital gold (I know lots of real wise financial experts don’t see it, but physics supports it), since it can be assigned the value of the energy used to produce them and they cannot be converted back to energy, unlike gold, at least Bitcoin , only have one use, storage of value. But other cryptocurrencies, that are better described as whole platforms or systems, like Ethereum, Neo, Icon, Cardano, actually have several multiple other uses for all the potential use cases where they can be used. Most utility tokens like Ripple’s XRP got some specific use case.
So the argument against Bitcoin not having intrinsic value fail to see the physics of energy/work/power transactions of human technology.
Bitcoin will have the storage value we decided to give it, with the basic energy equivalency of the work used in its production. And just like fiat money make gold useless to buy on the corner store, cryptocurrencies can also make fiat money useless on everyday ecommerce.
Any direct question you may write to me at [email protected]
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