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As Gold Hits New Record, Some See Warning Signs of Civilizational Collapse
(www.newsweek.com)
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this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2025
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Ah, but if you can find the book in thousands upon thousands of libraries spread all around the world, has anything been lost?
Bitcoin is crypto. Crypto is not Bitcoin. I strongly encourage you to look into the history of money. What has been used as money in the past, why it was used as money....rai stones are my favorite example.
Bitcoin, if you are able to understand the mechanics of it, is the "hardest" form of money that has ever existed. History shows money always flows into the hardest asset available. It also shows what happens when that asset loses its hardness. This is why gold has been king for a long, long time.
Then along came Bitcoin (NOT crypto, there was crypto before and crypto after), and it used game theory, the internet, math, cryptography and programming to become the most elegant store of value ever invented, which is also the hardest form of money ever created.
I actually loathe Bitcoin, even if I admire it and buy it. It's an energy nightmare. No one will ever convince me that it's "green" in any meaningful way. And I'm a huge environmentalist. But I'm not an idiot. It's inevitable. It's already started. Fiat currencies are going to start inflating uncontrollably and the money is going to go somewhere. If Bitcoin is superior as a store of value to gold, and more importantly is harder than gold, it's got a long, long way to go.
Maybe you should look in to the history of money. Gold has not been king for a long time. It never really was.
Silver has always been more common as a standard. Gold and silver were frequently used in conjunction with each other, and neither of them have served as a standard intentionally since 1971. Well before any crypto. Using gold and gold alone as the standard is actually quite rare, and one time happened by accident.
Fun fact, at one point the Spanish thought they'd found an incredible amount of silver only to discover halfway across the Atlantic that it was some other shiney silver metal. They proceeded to dump tons of worthless plantinum overboard so as to not pollute the silver supply.
On Yap Island, giant circular stones were used as a form of currency. Everyone kind of just agreed on who owned what stones. At one point one fell off a boat and sunk, but because everyone knew that stone was still there, they could still assign value to it, and so it still stood in as currency. This single example is the closest real world example to crypto you're going to find. And even obscure rocks on a remote island are a better investment because pretending a giant rock has value doesn't depend on the Internet continuing to exist.
Salt, in various forms, has been used as currency and a standard of value. This is literally the origin of the word Salary. Roman soldiers were paid in salt. In Ethiopia they used bars of it as recently as the 1900s. In West Africa they even used bottle caps when coinage was scarce.
As it happens, bottle caps are a pretty good currency. They're scarce, labeled, not super common, light and easy to carry, and easy to count. Notably, they also do not require the infrastructure that created them to continue to exist to retain value. None of the currencies I've mentioned, and to be clear these were currencies not commodities, require any of the technology that created them to exist to retain value. Bracelets, bricks of tea, tally sticks, seashells, even fucking Parmesan cheese all have functioned as a form of standard currency and all of them were better currencies than any crypto ever has been.
Crypto is a commodity. Except it only has value within is existing infrastructure. It will be like never getting able to check a book out of the library. Quite honestly if you're going to trade commodities, it's one of the least monstrous commodities to trade. The exorbitant energy costs notwithstanding.