Petrol may well be more valuable than gold in a Mad Max scenario, but don't think for a moment that any collection of humans will not want a way to disintermediate their labor and have a means of trade.
Within their society they'd use reputation-based credit, and with outsiders they'd use petrol. It's not clear why they'd need gold at all in your example.
The problem is that there are an infinite possible number of cryptographically signed digital currencies.
I'm not a BitCoin fan, but I'm not sure I buy this argument, because it seems too close to saying "gold can have no value because lots of other metals exist." How do you differentiate those two arguments?
Perhaps we should start exchanging goods and services with the exchange of WELL FUCK I DONNO goods and services?
You have a small business with several employees. It's time to make payroll so you whip out the goods and services box and...
Serge quickly discovered, to his surprise, that Goldman had a one-way relationship with open source. They took huge amounts of free software off the Web, but they did not return it after he had modified it, even when his modifications were very slight and of general rather than financial use....
Open source was an idea that depended on collaboration and sharing, and Serge had a long history of contributing to it. He didn’t fully understand how Goldman could think it was O.K. to benefit so greatly from the work of others and then behave so selfishly toward them....
The files contained a lot of open-source code he had worked with, and modified, over the past two years, mingled together with code that wasn’t open source but proprietary to Goldman Sachs. As he would later try and fail to explain to an F.B.I. agent, he hoped to disentangle the one from the other, in case he needed to remind himself how he had done what he had done with the open-source code, in the event he might need to do it again.
The use of money is all the advantage there is to having money. -- B. Franklin
