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Gold has value beyond store of value, but not nearly as much as you would think. A lot of what makes gold valuable is people's faith on it, and in that sense it
by Mahn 9y ago
Gold has value beyond store of value, but not nearly as much as you would think. A lot of what makes gold valuable is people's faith on it, and in that sense it's not significantly better than bitcoin. That's not to say that bitcoin prices are reasonable, but just that there's an irrational component in almost everything.
- candiodari 9y agoUnfortunately, it does not. There's 2 kinds of Gold people invest in. The non-loony ETFs, Swiss vault storage, etc. Let's simplify to "the GLD ETF" [1]. This of course isn't really gold, it's paper gold (and has in fact been fractional-reserve-banked: there is far more paper gold than actual gold). The loony gold storage: gold bars under your pillow. Unfortunately, the gold people use for payments is extremely regulated, specific grades of gold, guaranteed by a very small number of financial institutions (and numbered). Whilst at least these are obviously not oversubscribed, if you have one you can't sell it (aside from the subdivision problem), because there's no easy way to verify the guarantees, and there are an untold number of fakes in circulation. [1] tradingview.com/e/?symbol=GLD
- tim333 9y agoAs long as people like it as jewelry and are prepared to dig it up the price of gold will approximate the cost of digging it up as it has done for 2000+ years. Bitcoin doesn't have that.