I sense a business opportunity for a cryptocurrency that abides by Shariah tenets.
Hard doesn't mean "finite supply" or "price probably won't go down".
A house is valuable because you can live in it (intrinsic). A Bitcoin is valuable because only you control it, it cannot be confiscated, it cannot be censored, and others will always be willing to buy it from you. The day will come when nobody sells their Bitcoin. Why on earth would you trade the hardest asset for a softer one (Greshams Law) — unless your personal requirements needed that asset for other purposes (personal preference).
Again, you're not using the widely accepted definition of "hard". None of those qualities give you any ability to produce a new good. None of them mean anything if the price of Bitcoin crashes.
If the housing market crashes, I can still live in my house. If the Bitcoin market crashes, I can either sell my Bitcoin (and realize a huge amount of lost value) or maybe I can't, and then it has no value. It's just a string of characters in the end.
Also, many Bitcoins are censored. The large exchanges have blacklists of Bitcoins that they won't trade due to their involvement in criminal activity.
You can certainly find someone willing to buy them, but if most people are on exchanges that comply with the blacklist, your coins are much less liquid and much less valuable.
Even worse: Bitcoin will always be vulnerable to 51% attacks, which means I could lose any number of Bitcoin.
> The day will come when nobody sells their Bitcoin. Why on earth would you trade the hardest asset for a softer one (Greshams Law) — unless your personal requirements needed that asset for other purposes (personal preference).
This sounds like satire. What's the point of any asset that you never sell? It's literally useless -- a way to lock up and bury value.
It certainly is not satire. I believe what I wrote with great passion. I’d rather take a 51% risk (which… is not credible for many many years now) than a 100% risk my dollars are going to 0.
I agree about the fungability risk. Yes chain analytics is a thing. But it won’t be forever. Some UTXOs are bad. Not Surprisingly, enterprising folks have used various techniques to get around this. There is no mainnet filter on chain tho — a dirty utxo is as fungible as a Coinbase reward. It’s the centralized ecosystem that isn’t.
Despite its traditional value, gold is not only a shiny rock, it is an useful material in itself (it is not only used for jewelry).
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/hard_asset.asp
Intangible assets cannot be "hard".
Also, gold is not just a shiny rock. It can be made into electronic components, food, art, jewelry, and a huge variety of industrially-useful alloys.