> Unless you can find a contractor who will remodel your bathroom for gold (or god help them, bitcoin), or a food vendor who will take gold instead of your local currency (at an equivalent rate) then when you actually need goods and services, you convert to a local currency, which is taxed.
I'm not sure if you've spent any time hanging around in the world of illegal immigrants, but in my family's circles, there _are_ contractors that are loose family friends of ours who _do_ take gold in order to perform services. Often the gold is repurposed into jewellery or otherwise sold to other immigrant-owned businesses. Eventually someone in the immigrant network can wash the gold clean. Members of our extended family fled civil war by holding jewellery on their person , and there are stories of others who melted their jewellery down and travelled with it, and used these to fund their lives in Western nations they emigrated to. Now that my family's country has politically stabilized this is a lot rarer and as such I don't know, at least in our extended network, anyone who still washes gold clean.
Sure - and this is where there is marginal use for value stores like this, but two thoughts
1. You are dealing with "family friends" who have a clear social connection (and reputation!), helping to mitigate the risk that they simply run off - not the case for sending digital coins to a person you've never met.
2. You are in a situation where you're choosing to avoid government enforcement because of legality issues (in this case, immigration status). This is also why bitcoin worked for dark markets - No one cared that the government wasn't going to enforce your bitcoin transaction, because that lack of enforcement was already a given based on the goods being traded (illegal/black market items)
In both of these cases - basically any asset can fill that role. Shiny metal, food, expensive clothing, jewelry, guns, drugs etc. Bitcoin is appealing for basically one reason alone - it weighs nothing (and as a side effect, can be digitally transferred). Since usually the limiting factor in barter is literally how much weight in goods you can drag away.
The problem, and this is genuinely where I become annoyed, is that the speculation the above poster is so happy about actually degrades the usefulness of bitcoin in this space. No one wants to hold an asset that might lose 25% of its value over night, and no one wants to spend a currency that might gain 25% of its value over night either. This run of "get rich quick" fools and "pump and dump" fan boys have been a plague on the usefulness of digital coins since people realized bitcoin shot up in price any time the media mentioned it, way back in 2012. Then they harp on and on about how digital coins are the next finance, without understanding the current system, because their incentives aren't aligned with actually using the thing as a currency, they're entirely aligned with getting more suckers on board in their speculation scam.
So yes - if you're in the (very small) minority of folks who either won't or can't use governmental recourse anyways - there was at one point in time some usefulness for bitcoin. But unless you're planning on buying drugs or guns online, my current advice is to stick with gold.
I'm not sure if you've spent any time hanging around in the world of illegal immigrants, but in my family's circles, there _are_ contractors that are loose family friends of ours who _do_ take gold in order to perform services. Often the gold is repurposed into jewellery or otherwise sold to other immigrant-owned businesses. Eventually someone in the immigrant network can wash the gold clean. Members of our extended family fled civil war by holding jewellery on their person , and there are stories of others who melted their jewellery down and travelled with it, and used these to fund their lives in Western nations they emigrated to. Now that my family's country has politically stabilized this is a lot rarer and as such I don't know, at least in our extended network, anyone who still washes gold clean.