2tights. I don't think thats necessarily true. Gold's industrial value is peanuts compared to its monetary value.

No monetary media needs to have an industrial value. In fact, it's an important property of any monetary medium that it works as well as possible as a token of exchange and as badly as possible for anything else (other wise it has a tendency to go out of circulation as gold jewellery, circuitry and teeth have done). The monetary medium derives its value from it's "role" in the economy, not from any sense of "intrinsic value" (which is a misnomer anyway - it's easily demonstrate-able that nothing has intrinsic value).

Gold was the "bitcoin" of the old physical world markets. It had certain characteristics of fungibility, resistance to counterfeiting, ilmited supply etc which made it function as a token of value. It was the fact that it was widely adopted in a monetary role that have it it's value - not the other way around.

Here's an example to illustrate. If you go to a kids funpark and buy a few of those plastic tokens for the rides, they'll cost you about 5 Eu / Dollars whatever each. On the other hand, if you buy them in a hardware shop, they'll cost about 1 cent each. So you're paying a markup of many thousands of percent for exactly the same plastic token that is in the monetary role. Nothing to do with "intrinsic value" of plastic tokens.

Gold is exactly the same - it doesn't not have any intrinsic value. It's just that people make a deeply rooted association with gold and value historically, so the word 'intrinsic' gets used to reflect that.

We now live in an electronic trading environment, however and you can't "hold" gold electronically so a new monetary medium is required, hence the emergence of cryptocurrencies.

When you look at it analytically in this way, they actually have more justification for a high valuation than gold does.