I am skeptical about gold. It's not backed by anything. It's a fairly useless metal
Perception is reality.
Gold does not have to be backed by a commodity, because it
is a commodity.
I don't agree that it's useless.
I don't agree that perception is reality. Reality is what is is. regardless of what people believe it is.
Adams Smiths greatest student, J. B. Say, wrote two centuries ago: money is indebted for its currency . . . to its being a commodity bearing a peculiar and intrinsic value.
Go to a society where people doesn't know anything about gold. They have an open market, they trade goods between them, but they don't know about gold. So, where's the value? What you can do with your gold in that society? So, your gold piece in that society still have an instrisic value. But you can't do anything with that, it's useless.
The U.S. dollar is backed by the world's most powerful military pumped by $7xx billion dollars annually. So yes, it IS backed by something. Something very large and unfathomably destructive.
But US dollar is not redeemable. This is an interesting point, although of not being the case of US dollar. So, for example, the pound sterling notes have this sentece: "I promise to pay the the bearer on demand the sum of X pounds". But this is just bullshit.
Also, the US dollar is useful only as a medium of exchange only in the countries which use the US dollar as currency.
Bitcoin is not a currency. A 'virtual currency,' perhaps...but not a currency. It's simply a medium of exchange. Just like credit cards, money orders, paypal, and the likes. IT IS NOT A CURRENCY, no matter what a neckbeard or tinfoil hatter will tell you.
Credit card, money orders and PayPal are not a medium of exchange. They are a medium of payment.
Anyway, it seems you just did a copy and paste of this, these sentences sound familiar to me... Bitcoin is a currency. It is a unity of account. It has intrisic value. It is a store of value. But, of course, without acceptance your bitcoins are not money.
Fair enough on credit card and paypal being a medium of payment. But it's no different than bitcoin...since ultimately bitcoin is nothing more than a means to ultimately convert to fiat somewhere along the chain.
And show me any country that official defines bitcoin as a 'currency' and not loosely as a 'virtual currency.' There's a fine difference. One is backed by governments and power...the other are not.