"Holding value" is a fallacy.
It is? The dollars in your pocket don't hold any value?
Value is not inherent to gold, or anything else.
I didn't say it was. I did say value is speculative and subjective.
The primary advantage gold had compared to other commodities is that it is difficult to counterfeit or arbitrarily increase its supply.
I don't disagree.
The reason that we use money is because it solves the double coincidence of wants problem, but at the cost of making it possible for the issuer of the money to consume products and services without first creating equivalent value.
This happens with centralized issuers, and I believe is a key reason people call Ripple a scam.
The first spender of newly-issued money gets to claim a portion of everybody else's deferred consumption for themselves.
It's not easy to avoid this drawback entirely because money has to somehow transition from a state of not existing to existing, so somebody is going to get to be the first spender.
Gold doesn't have this problem.
Bitcoin addresses this by making the first spender work to build the network, and distributes new currency in a manner that is transparent and not subject to arbitrarily change. It's probably the best tradeoff we'll be able to achieve any time soon.
On a large enough scale so as to challenge centrally issued fiat I believe that's true.