“If you’d read my post carefully, I said that if we were to move beyond barter, we would probably return to gold.”
Except that it would not be gold if China held all of it... There’s nothing magic about gold. It’s just a rare commodity. Not that much different than a bit-com. It’s only worth what people perceive it to be worth.
Every word you wrote is true. All value is subjective.
Gold has been highly-valued for millennia. Virtually all of it that has ever been mined still exists and its quantity rarely increases by more than 1% or 2% a year.
AND it's tangible. You can hold it in your hand or gaze upon it in your safe deposit box. I may be nothing but a dinosaur, but I still think gold's tangibility will be the eventual death [or disadvantage] of the BitCoin crowd.
All of that my puny opinion, of course. I hold no ill will toward electronic currency per se. I don't think BitCoin's a "ponzi scheme". The Internet's just too slippery to convince me that it's a long-lasting phenomenon.