One of the arguments sometimes used to defend the price of gold is that it is in fact quite useless.
The argument is that money has to be stable. The quantity of a consumable resource like copper fluctuates too much for it to be used as a reliable store of value.
Gold on the other hand is rarely consumed. Even when it's used, it is merely transformed into jewellery which can easily be turned back into its pure commodity form. Gold is therefore a good store of value.
Now that the price of Bitcoin is becoming increasingly hard to defend, this argument is again used. The sheer uselessness of Bitcoin is, according to this logic, a reason to value it highly. No-one will ever use it for anything. Additionally, its future quantity is even more limited than gold.
The problem with this logic is of course the claim that uselessness is a valuable quality. The fact that gold is not consumed does not make it useless. People all over the world wear gold jewellery. Gold is used as ornamentation. It is a simple way to show off wealth.
If Bitcoin retains its current price, Bitcoin millionaires will buy gold to show off their wealth, just as much as people who've made millions off of real estate or technology stocks show off in this way.
But there is no corresponding demand for Bitcoin. One cannot discretely show off ones wealth by wearing a chain of pure Bitcoin.
However, Bitcoin is in fact a commodity. So much is true. There is no counter party risk in holding Bitcoin securely offline on a memory chip. But so what? Dangling that chip on a piece of string around the neck of a beautiful woman is not going to impress anyone.
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