It has an intrinsic value that can easily be explained. You absolutely need it for many uses (electronics, medical devices, jewelry in practice, ...).
So there is always gonna be a buyer at a non-zero price.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, has a few things going for it (fixed monetary policy, decentralization, permissionless, ...) but I am not sure about the intrinsic value. The only thing that I can think of is its network effect and derived amazing hash power that secures it. You can't recreate that easily in a new cryptocurrency.
I'd wager the intrinsic value of gold has little to do with its valuation, since the vast majority of it is used for banking and jewelry. Contrast that with metal from the platinum group, like palladium, which are heavily use for things like catalytic filters.
From an industrial point of view, gold is just fancy copper.
Gold is useful for less tangible purpose because it's accepted, and it's accepted because it's useful. BTC is similar in that respect.
Unlike the guy replying to you I think BTC has nothing going for it in practice when compared to gold. Gold has value because every government and market agreed on it. It's regulated and safely stored.
BTC is theoretically decentralized. In practice it goes through wallets and exchanges which get robbed all the time. It can't be used for any transaction because it's expensive so it's no replacement to currency. Even buying gold physically is cheaper than buying BTC (transaction costs). It's even less private than gold. I can walk into a shop, pay cash for gold and there will be no record of the transaction. With BTC the government just tracked crooks who moved BTC through the dark web and through private currencies. It leaves a huge, traceable digital trail.
Finally, BTC isn't regulated. That means a lot of the transactions are internal wallet to wallet transfers meant to "pump" the market. That's legal for BTC. So the idea that it's value is "objective" is BS.
The only people who would go into BTC in these conditions are crooks and useful idiots.
BTC was a smart idea that just doesn't work in reality. Right now it's running on the fumes of people who "believe" in it since it keeps bouncing back up. Faith based monetary systems run the world, but unlike BTC we have government to support them when we lose faith.
Equities are investment vehicles. If you choose to trade them, that's your decision - but you will lose, on average. 95% of day traders lose money [1]. Zero-sum financial instruments like futures and options and cryptocurrencies are trading vehicles. These are not the same.
Both are trading vehicles and are treated the same by traders [1] similar to the VIX. Hedge funds, asset management companies and institutions spend their time and their clients money trading, not investing [2]. For groups like these, trading is where the money is.
The VIX is a synthetic index whose value is derived from the implied volatility of the S&P 500 index options (computed from the premium of around-the-money options on the SPX cash index a certain amount of time ahead), without fundamentals, tradeable only via futures contracts and ETFs that own those futures.
It's a second derivative tradeable only via third derivative.
This is very very zero-sum.
The overwhelming majority of these actively managed funds fail to beat the returns of the S&P 500. [1]
In fact over 15 years 92% of actively managed large-cap funds trail the returns of the S&P 500.
A lot of semi educated traders frankly don't care. They follow crowd psychology based idioms with risk management. Cryptos are just a more volatile asset class to profit on.
Ok, but Twitter is a company with intrinsic value?
Not all equities will be a good investment but equities in aggregate are positive sum. Cryptocurrencies are negative sum or zero sum depending on consensus mechanism.
