Adverse Event said:
Gold/PM's carry value historically because governments settled transactions in gold.
Pm's need an end buyer for the value to exist, otherwise it's just trading shiny, malleable rocks, which might as well be shells at that point.
The gold demand for electronics is microscopic to the supply. Majority of gold is paper, but the real gold is stored unmoving in vaults. We can only ESTIMATE the total supply of accessible gold, so how can you have any accurate value associated with it, unless an authority tells you what they'll pay for it.
You're focusing too much on the total value of gold versus what I'm trying to emphasize: gold can be liquidated into local currency. As can the other things listed. What that value may be we do not know, but it can be physically transferred to another owner for CBDCs because the new owner knows that he can convert it down the road into an amount of CBDCs. May be nothing more than jewelry, but it can be sold. May lose a ton of value, but he can sell it. Unless for some reason the government programmed CBDCs to be unusable for gold.
I'm trying to use your original hypothetical where the government does in fact program the CBDCs as a de facto social credit score and can program it to determine what you can and can't purchase. In that scenario that you posited, bitcoin could easily become absolutely worthless because the recipient of your bitcoin will be incapable of converting that into CBDCs. If it can not be converted to CBDCs, the bitcoin has to stay in the black market. Current criminals do not sell drugs/guns/women for cash in order to buy more illegal things (other than more illegal products to sell). They launder their profits so they can buy legal things that they want. Big houses, fancy cars, etc. They can't buy those things in drugs and women and guns. They have to convert it to cash. In the future, it would need to convert to CBDCs
In your scenario, should the government chose to program CBDCs to be unusable on crypto coins, if they sell those drugs for bitcoins, they can not go buy those nice legal things because the bitcoin is not capable of being laundered. That bitcoin has to create value in its own marketplace. It HAS to become its own currency that will help the user buy things that would normally be purchased in CBDCs. In order for that black market to work, it would have to become a full parallel economy. I need to be able to get a home loan from an institution that operates in bitcoin. I need to go grocery shopping at a store that accepts it. I need to find a utility company who will let me pay my bills with it. All technically possible. But again, in the hypothetical that YOU proposed, we're living under an authoritarian government hellbent on control. Do you think they would allow major companies to participate in that parallel economy? How would such a parallel economy survive? I could realistically see a Bitcoin market for food stuffs and things of that nature. But a Bitcoin market to buy a car? To fill up at the station down the road? To buy a house? To pay your water and electric bill? It would end up being homeless outlaws trading with each other because the tender with which they trade would never be able to re-enter the legal market place.
None of this may come to pass. The CBDCs may be just like the effectively cashless society we have today. Bitcoin may still have its uses. I'm not trying to poke holes in Bitcoin altogether. I'm merely showing that in the authoritarian future you posit, Bitcoin can become completely and utterly worthless towards helping you live a normal life with the push of a button. "Error: transaction not allowed". Now what?
