First of all I understand you meant to reply to the actual article and not my comment, but anyway. I believe that you misunderstand Jared’s message, which should be clear if you read “Bitcoin and Ethereum Are Dead (And Their Honest Investors Know It)”. His point is that these cryptos were early iterations of a brilliant concept and thus are doomed to go extinct, not because the concept of cryptocurrency is unworkable, but because better iterations have already appeared, while a lot of the investors in BTC are only there because they hope to cash out, not because they believe in the long-term prospects of BTC.

He might or might not be right, I can’t say. I only commented on the part which I understand, which is the comparison with gold. Gold too has a subjective value, only less so than crypto because it has physical properties which are desirable, because it is naturally rare and because recently it has become actually useful for something other than decoration. To put it differently in the extreme (but not entirely unlikely) case of catastrophic collapse of our digital networks or in case of a global conflict (which might cause such a collapse, partial or complete, among other things) cryptocurrencies will either disappear without a trace or devaluate completely. The same, of course, will happen with fiat money because in effect they’re just bits of paper which correspond to nothing but a common agreement regarding its value. The only thing that will retain its value is gold, because it’s physical, it can change hands and does not depend on an infrastructure than can collapse.

That’s why in times of crisis gold trading usually increases. But I’m not an expert on economics, so I could be wrong.