>>60620732
Economic units have demand not because of belief, but because their supply properties allow demand to alter price primarily instead of supply, enabling economically useful functionality such as Store of Value and other economic abstractions. This is why grain et al, despite having great “intrinsic value” and near-universal acceptance performs poorly as an economic unit, grain has huge elastic supply so increasing demand results in increased supply, instead of increased price, preventing the encoding of economic state information into the price of grain and therefore preventing the use of grain et al as an economic unit.
Gold has been used as an economic unit since antiquity because its low elastic supply render it a fine natural approximation of a unit, but it still possesses elastic supply, bitcoin surpasses gold primarily by possessing perfect inelastic supply, while network effects keep BTC ahead of newer imitations as they fail to improve on the systemically important properties of bitcoin.
