I was going through some old boxes in the garage the other day, when lo and behold, I came across a time capsule full of childhood memories: old action figures, Garbage Pail Kids, comic books and, of course, a hoard of thousands of old baseball cards. I’d long since come to grips – like every child of the ‘80s and ‘90s – with the reality that my stash of Jose Canseco Rated Rookie cards was not, after all, going to put my kids through college. Heck, my own kids barely showed a passing curiosity toward them. Somewhere around the turn of the century, people lost interest in baseball cards, and once that happened, they were worthless, junk, just scraps of paper. Well, I guess this is a market where the bubble burst, I thought. At least I had a lot of fun memories to show for it.

Funny thing – the fate of baseball cards is also what a lot of the naysayers are predicting will happen to Bitcoin one day, and “intrinsic value,” or the lack thereof, is the centerpiece in that argument. I remember an article in a hobby magazine from the late 1980s, in which a card dealer marveled at the precarious success of his own profession:

When you take everything else away, a piece of cardboard with a picture of a baseball player on it is not inherently “worth” anything. The only value they have is an arbitrary price that we’re willing to pay just because we’re willing to pay it.. If you were collecting silver dollars, and suddenly everybody stopped collecting them, at least they would be worth the value of the silver bullion itself. But with baseball cards, even the ones that sell for a nickel have no real reason to be “worth” it.

His words are paraphrased through a 25-year lens, but the dealer’s revelation about the baseball-card bubble was essentially the same as what people are claiming about Bitcoin today: Without tangible assets to back it up, an arbitrary value that we affix to something only remains for as long as people stay interested in it. That assertion is true whether we’re talking about baseball cards, Cabbage Patch Kids, Bitcoins, or anything else whose worth is not attached to its practical value.

What’s interesting, though, is that detractors of baseball cards and Bitcoin both use precious metals as a counterpoint – gold and silver are examples of things that do makes sense as tokens of value, because they possess intrinsic worth. If the baseball-card dealer from the late’80s had listened to his own advice and put his money into precious metals, he could have earned 10 times his money in silver, or quadrupled it in gold, instead of ending up with nothing.

But there’s a more important question lurking here: WHY is gold a good store of value? As a metal, it has its niche purposes, but other metals like iron, copper and aluminum are far more useful. It’s widely used as a decoration, but its appearance is simple to copy. When it comes down to it, the only reason why gold has any intrinsic value is that we all agree on it as a standard.

That tells us two things about Bitcoin. First, it’s not destined for failure, because gold, and for that matter, most national currencies, have already proven that something need not have “intrinsic” value in order to be valuable. The most important thing is that it’s agreed upon. This is not to say that Bitcoin is necessarily destined for success either – baseball cards (among countless other examples) show us just how easy it is for tokens to lose their value when times change.

The second important message that gold tells us is that, where permanently successful stores of value are concerned, inertia is a powerful force. The U.S. dollar has been used as such a value store for centuries; precious metals and gems have been around since the beginning of recorded history, and that’s about it as far as truly standard tokens of value go in this country. Other alternatives have succeeded in spots, but if we’re talking about the goal of becoming a long-term, universally accepted measure of worth, that’s so far been a once-in-a-lifetime thing, if that. Not that it never happens: When Magellan set out on his famous circumnavigation of the globe, risking hundreds of lives, what was his practical motivation? Pepper and cloves, which used to be their own sort of “precious metals,” but which you can find today at the local dollar store. It’s not that things never change, it’s just that it’s a big deal when they do.

So the question we should be asking is not, “Will Bitcoin fail because it has no inherent value?” – because inherent value isn’t the point. A better question is: “What about the current situation favors it becoming agreed upon?” If I were to make a purchase today, what would make Bitcoin a more attractive form of payment than the U.S. dollar?

The first answer typically given is privacy; since Bitcoin doesn’t have your name on it, per se, it is more anonymous than other online payments. While true, this argument fails the test of creating a compelling reason for universal adoption, simply because for the great majority of transactions, anonymity doesn’t matter. Sure, there is always a certain segment of the public that will go out of its way to stand up for privacy on principle, and another segment that may prefer to keep certain types of legal but somewhat dodgy transactions – for example, adult entertainment – a little more “private.” But that’s only ever going to be a relatively small percentage of transactions by a relatively small segment of the population. As for the rest: If I’m the average person and the FBI can find out that I bought a wheelbarrow or subscribe to Netflix, I probably don’t care enough to use a virtual currency that I know little about, and about which I may have heard some nasty rumors concerning safety and black-market practices.

In other words, for most of my purchases, the additional cost of using Bitcoins is the trouble it takes to obtain them, and the very real chance that the seller does not accept them; the benefit is anonymity that I don’t need for an ordinary transaction. Maybe this changes over the next several years as online tracking and snooping become ever more pervasive, but for now, the regular dollar wins out there.

The other major upside people see in Bitcoin is its potential as a sort of fluid border-free currency, and that’s where the real promise lies in my mind. It would be nice not to worry about foreign exchange rates, extra fees and time spent, or in some cases, simply not being able to execute a foreign transaction at all. We’ve already seen steps taken to address this in areas where it was a problem (see: the European Union), so the proof-of-concept is there. Will there be a form of global currency some day? It’s entirely possible. Will it be Bitcoin? It’s too early to tell.

The key, of course, will be the ability to easily exchange Bitcoins for real-world goods – a difference between real money and sort-of money that everyone involved with cryptocurrencies is well aware of. I personally mined a few thousand Dogecoins just for fun, knowing that for the time being, there was really nothing I could “buy” with them. With Bitcoin, that trend seems to be going in the right direction, but will it reach a critical mass? Who knows. A big retailer like eBay or Amazon could start accepting it (for a fee, of course) and change things overnight. Or, it could continue on its current course as a specialty form of payment – an occasional star, but a curiosity to most.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. A global currency just has to do its own job; it doesn’t have to dominate all other forms of payment – a mistaken impression that a lot of people rooting both for and against Bitcoin seem to share. The idea of a world in which cryptocurrencies exist alongside the current system and make certain things easier is both pleasant and achievable. Talk of Bitcoin obsoleting the dollar and creating some chaotic, lawless new financial system just tends to alienate, or at least confuse, the average outsider.

As it stands right now, Bitcoin is surviving, a notable achievement in itself. Because of the difficulties mentioned above, I don’t think it’s going to become a large-scale replacement for ordinary currency anytime soon, but then again, it doesn’t need to. The door is wide open for it to fill a useful role in payments – and once we get past the boom-or-bust mentality that so many of us observers have, we’ll start to get a real idea of what that role is.