The Intrinsic Value of Bitcoins
energy = productivity = value
What the eff is gold going to do for you if you survive the Apocalypse?
Nothing at all. In fact, trying to carry it with you will become somewhat of a problem. If you actually have the physical goods to begin with, because I doubt there is any real world gold bars to be found behind current day gold trading.
The reason gold is a useful investment in today’s world is the fact that it connects people. The desirability of the precious metals in the form of jewelry can affirm your relationships, and those relationships is what we actually value behind the commodity.
But the gold standard has been left behind a long time ago. In favor of a much better commodity. Oil. This was actually a smart move since the idea behind leverage is that you pay a raincheck on future productivity. And besides the fact that oil could actually be a useful post-apocalyptic survival commodity, it also is the base of all industrialized productivity worldwide (including secondary requirements like infrastructure etc.) So it makes sense to couple your future productivity to oil, by coupling your currency to oil.
But now we start to run out of (reasonably accessible) oil, and the US is also running out of future productivity. And this means that the value of the dollar can no longer be guaranteed by any institution unless they can find a new commodity that has an even larger effect than oil has on the industrialized nations. I doubt they will find it, and it remains to be seen whether other industrialized giants will allow the US to control such an asset.
The only asset that will come close is the source of any new energy regime after the oil era. This is most likely solar energy and hydrogen. And therefore the intrinsic value of bitcoins could be settled really quickly: as soon as the first sustainable energy giant allows trading of its energy by bitcoins, we have the ultimate backing of bitcoins, or any coin for that matter: its existence inevitably depends on the sustained availability of (distributed) energy, and that energy represents productivity in the same way as oil does today.
