[palmer]

With its durability, finite and difficult-to-extract supply and natural allure,

He could be talking about bitcoin except he's an old fart and doesn't realize it. Bitcoins are more durable than most digital artifacts. They certainly are finite and very precisely defined to be difficult to mine, unlike gold which is sometimes discovered in haphazard quantities. The allure of bitcoin is fairly obvious, they would not be collected otherwise.

[Rebel_Ace]

"...Bitcoins are more durable than most digital artifacts..."

The underlying weakness of ALL "digital artifacts" is that they require a complex, delicate and advanced infrastructure to be made use of.

Not too long ago, NASA was freaking out because gobs and gobs of Apollo Mission data on tape was effectively "lost" because no machines around could read their format. This data was "valuable and rare" having been obtained by unimaginable blood and tears going to the Moon. Imagine trying to recover something from an 8 inch floppy disk formatted by CP/M...

Whenever the underlying computer network that makes BitCoins readable and transferrable is unavailable, BitCoins effectively do not exist. If the outage is local and temporary, it is merely an inconvenience. If it is widespread and long term, well, all the BitCoins vanish for all practical purposes.

That all being said, banks today move informational bits, and not bars of bullion. Bits are easier and faster to whiz around the world. Gold, Silver and other physical commodities often used to back currency are cumbersome and inconvenient.

But.... A bar of bullion will survive an EMP pulse.