Right, except that gold has inherent value. Historically we thought it was pretty and made jewelry out of it. It’s important for a variety of technology products. It’s a value store because it is consistently valuable first. Bitcoin skips that step.
Gold has pretty big downsides as a store of value. It's heavy, hard to transport, ... .
The key to a cryptocurrency store can be memorized in your head. That means I can have 2mil in my head, with no other way to access it. I take it wherever I go, and can access it when there is internet. I can also send it to whoever I want, no limit.
This is literally a 1st. How high people value that, is not up to me alone. But you cannot deny that it has some value. And as long as it has some value, the above works. It basically bootstrapped itself. Claiming it has a value of 0 is very short sighted.
Also, nobody quits MasterCard et al because it relies on the internet...the transactions are cached, and the few problems when things come back online are dealt with as a standard "doing business" item — everywhere from insurance agencies to corner stores.
So does elliptic curve signing, radio, digital storage. Confirming a transaction in this state would probably be competitive with making change for, verifying, securely exchanging, securely transporting and securely storing gold.
