Saw some wise words expressed on Youtube (A rarity, these days) but sums up my sentiment on the future of crypto and blockchain technology:
Bitcoin qualifies (or attempts to qualify, if you're skeptical) as a money due to its finite supply. But it was not designed to beat gold as a money, it was designed to beat paper as a currency! And that's exactly what we need if we're ever going to escape the historical cycle of gold, gold standard, paper fiat, hyperinflationary collapse, back to gold, rinse and repeat.
With Bitcoin, you can send funds to someone halfway around the world in under ten minutes, with no need for third parties. With government fiat, a wire transfer between banks might take 3-5 business days, minus hefty transaction fees. With all the recent regulatory clamping down on travel, a gold bar may never get there. So while fiat beats gold in this category, Bitcoin beats fiat. The ramifications of this advantage alone could prove to be huge.
Other properties worthy of mention are divisibility and recognizability. Precious metals are certainly divisible, but picking out exact change in coins is kind of a nuisance compared to today's credit system, where a swipe of a card always deals the exact amount. Meanwhile, a Bitcoin transfer holds precision up to 8 decimal places, without hampering the feasibility of the transfer. So in this sense, I'd say Bitcoin is in a tie with fiat and has an edge over metals. Recognizability (resistance to counterfeit) also favors Bitcoin. While there certainly are tests that can be performed to authenticate precious metals, it's impractical to perform this confirmation with every transaction. Government currencies have all those fancy watermarks and whatnot; I don't know how well they resist counterfeiting but at least it's an easy check to perform. But Bitcoin transactions are confirmed multiple times all throughout the network and are therefore impossible to counterfeit. And you can't mix copper or tungsten with a Bitcoin! So while I can't say whether gold beats fiat in this category, Bitcoin certainly does.
I understand why he and many other gold and silver advocates tend to be skeptical of Bitcoin. On the surface, a recent invention seems to bear no resemblance to a commodity that has withstood the test of time, and the current fluctuating price hardly indicates a store of value. But the philosophy behind the invention was a recognition of two things: 1) a sound money must be in finite supply, and 2) the only way to beat fiat is to outperform it as a currency.
I posted this in NEM because i think Bitcoin does have it's own flaws - largely it's PoW algorithm which in the end, centralizes mining power in the hands of those corporations or rich individuals who can then control the majority of mining power -- essentially making them the banks of bitcoin like banks in the FIAT sphere -- this can make or break bitcoin in my honest opinion. NEM is a good step at circumventing this problem.