Bitcoin's value is based entirely on transaction flow and artificial scarcity of block size. For gold or silver there's an actual cost of production price floor. Oil makes up a large part of that floor, but even if you invent free energy, you're still constrained by the fact that you're in a closed ecosystem with limited supply and most of what can be mined has already happened anyway, and most things on the periodic table have some type of inelastic demand in the first place.
What interest me is the role bitcoin plays in improving the signalling mechanism of money. sidhujag has referred to a near perfect money from the framework of Nash's asymptotically ideal money.
At first glance bitcoin does not appear to be ideal money at all. It's utterly fixed quantity of 21 million creates a permanent incentive against growth. In a world with bitcoin as currency people would under-invest as it becomes very profitable to just to hold money. Bitcoin as money introduces a vector opposing growth.
Bitcoin, however, does not exist in a vacuum. It coexists alongside a usury based fiat system. This financed based system is built upon very different foundations. Usury introduces a vector for eternal exponential growth. Eternal exponential growth is impossible in a finite world so under our current system we must progressively lie to ourselves to maintain the illusion of exponential growth.
In mathematics if one wishes to zero out a vector field you introduce a vector pointing in the opposite direction. We may be able to achieve asymptotically ideal money not via any single currency breakthrough but by the existence of competing currencies founded upon differing fundamental assumptions different vectors.
If we allow free flow of capital between these currencies capital can flow between them matching overall growth signaling with underlying reality. Perhaps ideal money will not be a single currency but the result of a dynamic competition between them.
I've thought a bit about this. If bitcoin was used as the default currency you can pay taxes in then banks would refuse to lend.. ie people with bitcoin would then become banks. You wouldn't want to loan your coins out? There will always be peaks and troughs in the market, so maybe during a downturn people loan coins for cheap (lower interest rates) while on uptrends the demand for loans picks up but at higher interest rates based on that demand. In general people want to HODL as they expect higher prices but there will still be lending available because people want to assure income through interest rates as lenders and borrowers want to always make more coin. Lenders know they will get their coins back so they will always lend with interest unless the borrower defaults (which is risk placed in the calculation of the interest rate to the borrower).