[Cryptography] Standards Trolls: Re: Bitcoin is a disaster.

[Ray Dillinger]

On Sun, 2021-01-03 at 18:07 -0500, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> 
> People talk about Fiat currencies as only having value because
> everyone has a collective delusion that they have value --- but the
> same is true for Gold.  Why the heck is Gold considered valuable?
> There are other metals which are rarer (and thus have a more limited
> supply) than Gold, such as for example, Ruthenium and Tellurium, and
> some of these elements have more industrial value than Gold.  The
> reality is that Gold is considered a valuable financial commodity
> because of an an accident of history that Gold was both (a) rare, but
> not too rare, and (b) could be refined using the technology from the
> Bronze age and up, such that everyone has agreed that Gold is a store
> of value for millenia, and so Gold has a privileged position over
> that
> of other more-difficult to find and refine and useful metals that are
> out there,

Gold was unique among the metals they were capable of refining at the
time, not really for its considerable rarity, but for its durability. 
Gold doesn't oxidize, rust, or tarnish the way almost all other metals
do.  And this virtue was seen as very important in something which was
among other things supposed to be a store of value.  It wouldn't do to
have coins made of iron and lost a significant fraction of your fortune
to rust and the need to polish rust away.

As you say, a historical accident and a fairly arbitrary characteristic
- but not quite a random one. Not a property we think of today when we
consider the value of gold. 

I can't think of any similar virtue that would distinguish one
cryptocurrency from the next, in principle.