"Bitcoins have no non-monetary use-value.", therefor bitcoins are not money. I keep seeing this meme everywhere, including from smart people, including Austrian-style thinkers and some libertarians. Now personally, I'm nothing more than an armchair economist at best, but this idea that money has to have some form of significant use-value outside of money seems downright ridiculous. Do people seriously think that gold trades at nearly $1600/oz because you can fashion jewelry out of it? I can fashion jewelry out of a lot of things besides gold.
Apparently a lot of otherwise smart people believe this, and I find it somewhat disheartening that this is so widely believed.
If anything, having non-monetary use-value is not a good property for money, because the value/supply of money then becomes tethered to industrial demand.
I'm not very well read, I'm loosely familiar with Keynes, Hayek, Von Mises, but I've never read any of their works or any other major economic works for that matter. I started Hazlitt's economics in one lesson, but didn't get very far. Can somebody please point to some well known scholarly work that frames this argument a bit more elegantly than I can?
If they need a scholarly quote to change their mind, then they're not able to think. They need to realize that having a commodity backing money costs money, it costs to aquire, transport, and store gold.
The utilization of money to create money through economic activity is the intrinsic value of money. They're trying to say "let's sacrifice this intrinsic value to add a minimum value to it", doesn't make any sense.