Gold is Money because it has the properties of Money. It's scarce, divisible, fungible, long-lived, easy to transport. It works great as a ledger! It also takes energy in the form of work to mine gold.

Bitcoin pioneered digital Money by being the first Money/Ledger that is backed by computational energy units. It takes computational work to generate bitcoins. You know this.

But the question is, just how fungible is Bitcoin really? Well, The Bitcoin Network syncs a public ledger (the Blockchain) and the public nature of the ledger allows for the identification and tracking of all bitcoins. See: http://www.coindesk.com/us-government-lockheed-martin-bitcoin-analysis-tool/ Basically, since you can identify and track each bitcoin, over-time, the fungibility of Bitcoin drops away. ALL of the Alt-coins forked from the Bitcoin codebase share this fungibility issue.

Enter Monero.

Monero is private digital Money based on the CryptoNote protocol. Monero is not a Bitcoin fork! It is not an Altcoin! Monero is the archetype for fungible digital Money. It stands on it's own alongside Bitcoin. There is even an ecosystem of Monero-based Altcoins developing and I expect the field of monero-alts to grow and thrive. The first such a coin is already out in the wild, it's called Aeon. This coin the first Monero-Alt forked from Monero's open source codebase. Privacy isn't just a feature anymore it's an emerging platform.

What is the value of privacy? The free market has begun to answer that question. The price of one Monero has increased by over 1400% in the past year. And Bitcoin old-timers like Roger Ver are predicting a $1Billion dollar market cap for Monero by the end of 2016. Over x10 times the current market cap but still minuscule compared to the market caps of established asset classes like Gold.

In the end, the want and need for privacy might be valued to such degree that a Bitcoin becomes "just another Alt".