Comment by eru

Well, there's pleasure from directly owning the thing: you can look at gold in your vault and appreciate it for itself.

But a bitcoin in your vault by itself is indistinguishable from a shitcoin I just made by forking bitcoin with the same code but a new genesis block. Or even more pointed: the alternative futures of bitcoins after any route not taken by the community after any hard fork.

In any case, I agree that much of the value of gold comes from social conventions, too, yes.