Yet you posted this (which, while not attributed in your post, I assume is attributable to Nash?):
Nowadays, however, few would propose a return to the actual use of simply the metal gold as a standard, for the following reasons.
(i) The cost of mining gold effectively does depend on the technology. Recent cyanide leaching techniques have made it possible again to profitability mind gold at formerly abandoned sites in the U.S. so that it is now a big producer. However, the unpredictability of the cost is a negative factor.
(ii) The location of potential gold-mining locations may not be “politically appealing.” so it would seem undesirable to make a political choice to enhance the economic importance of those particular areas.
(iii) There is some negative psychology about gold such tat even if it were the most logical choice after all, the unpopularity of the idea could be very obstructive.
However, right now platinum would be even better than gold, because it has more value per unit of weight.
So "Gold is fairly stable in value", so you aspire to "gold like properties", even though Nash argues "right now platinum would be even better than gold".
Fair enough. Kindly direct me to a statement of the definition for 'value' you wish to employ.
Consider rather this statement by Nash that proceeds what you highlight:
It is a coincidental fact that the inherent nature of mining and mining technology makes it possible for the prices of certain commodities that are produced as a result of the devotion of labor and capital to the effort of mining to increase less (or decrease more) than might be expected. There is a “dimension paradox”: Agricultural products are produced by using the two-dimensional resource of the earth surface, so the “disappearing frontier” creates a limitation. In contrast, some mining, particularly for elemental metals, can essentially be done in three dimensions, although, of course, there are increasing costs for deep digging. So, really there is lots and lots of gold, silver, platinum, tungtsten, and so forth out there and more can be found by digging deeper.
You see there is a natural throttle of the supply because of the cost of digging deeper that increases. Bitcoin has the same result, but a different mechanism for keeping the supply stable (which is related to the difficulty and the power of the network). In either case you can't actually just decide to mine "more".
Gold however, as Nash points out, is not locked in this sense (and Szabo writes about this too
http://unenumerated.blogspot.ca/2007/02/mining-vasty-deep-i.html)
So gold served well, but technological advance will eventually show gold to be not scarce, and so just because gold was scare in the past, and useful as an inflation hedge, it is unlikely to stay true for much longer (especially with an alternative inflation hedge available).
Platinum is good in this sense too but it has other limitations gold and bitcoin do not. So Nash is making a comment about a specific quality to highlight it, he isn't suggesting we use platinum as our basis for standard value.
I use "gold-like" because most people identify with it the easiest. We could say "stable in value like" but that's not really an example or metaphor.
There is no more useful definition for value. What I am suggesting is there is "some" underlying value, to be discovered the pricing system of the markets, and only god knows what that value is. There is no other way to define or find it, than the price of an EFFICIENT market, but that means that market needs a stable metric for value otherwise the price will fluctuate and not properly represent the underlying value.
Bitcoin's price is volatile but its underlying value is not at all expected to be.
"expected to be"? Expected by
whom?
If bitcoin's parameter remain unchanged, then any rational person would expect its value (not necessarily its PRICE!) to be fairly stable. If you dramatically change its underlying nature, why would you expect its value to stay stable?
