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That's quite a balony. - Both are in fixed quantity so none is more rare than other. - Gold has practical use in industry which puts lower bound on its value.

That's quite a balony. - Both are in fixed quantity so none is more rare than other. - Gold has practical use in industry which puts lower bound on its value. BTC has no lower bound. - Gold is exchangeable virtually in any country and any culture regardless of how technologically advanced that society is. - Thousands of years of history has proven that humans have almost natural lust for this shiny metal and it gets displayed as jewelry uses. This again further sets the lower bound for gold prices. - Gold is not only rare but is virtually rust proof and can be stowed away without any advanced tech for 100s of years. BTC will be pointless if there was a natural or human made disaster and few people had electricity. - Gold is far more unlikely to be made illegal by governments. - There are no new rare metals popping up every day like whole slew of new cryptocurrencies which might fragment and trump each other. No one knows which cryptocurrency will end up dominating 10 years down the line. - BTC has huge risk of getting stolen and hacked because someone exploiting zero day vulnerabilities in your system even if you did everything you possibly could to keep your system safe. - Governments can start their secret operations to control the crypto market behind the scene, hack in to exchanges, find vulnerabilities or do dirty trades. - Crypto exchanges are wild west without regulations which means clever deep pocketed traders would be exploiting them by techniques like frontrunning, wash trades, willybot, spoofing etc. This enables big investors to profit at the expense of small investors. Above arguments should make it clear that btc has very real upper bound that it can rationally reach and its most definitely less than gold market cap. Of course, big investors can juice up things in the short term but it would be impossible to sustain irrational highs on long term.

varjag 9y ago
Should just point out that gold was made illegal in multiple cultures on several occasions.
- svachalek 9y ago
  Some may be surprised to learn this includes the U.S. from 1933-1974.
  - Retric 9y ago
    Was not illegal to own, was illegal to hoard which is a critical difference.
milcron 9y ago
> Both are in fixed quantity so none is more rare than other. There is 80% more gold aboveground today than there was in 1980.
- sytelus 9y ago
  Gold exploration had been going on for thousands of years which means every new piece of gold is being discovered at much higher cost. So while supply increases, prices don't go down.
  - victor106 9y ago
    Similar to BTC
    - joering2 9y ago
      Not really. If you ask your Shaman to produce a poison and send it to every gold miner in the world and as a result no new gold will be mined, you still won't dig up much by simply putting shovel in your backyard. You would have to go to the last crust level they been at and start to dig from there, which makes it incredible expensive and complicated. Meanwhile, if for any reason, including breaking a Bitcoin blockchain by state-sponsored actor (or someone powerful enough; or simply forcing ISPs to ban traffic on mining ports now that NN is gone), when miners stop or move to something else, you can pick up from where they left off of and alone mine one bitcoin a minute on your mediocre laptop. Whether someone will pick up these coins from you at $15k per pop, that's a different story.
      - bmelton 9y ago
        > or simply forcing ISPs to ban traffic on mining ports now that NN is gone If the government can force ISPs to implement content-neutral routing, what on earth would stop the government from forcing ISPs to mandate content-neutral routing for everything except mining ports, or going even further to demand that DPI be used to investigate the content of all ports to prohibit mining activity?
  - 9y ago
pingec 9y ago
One disadvantage of gold I can think of is you cannot hide it in your head.
- loceng 9y ago
  No one can steal it from you with 50%+1 CPU resources though.
  - chrisco255 9y ago
    The 51% attack allows you to double spend. It doesn't allow you to steal other people's coin.
    - lern_too_spel 9y ago
      By allowing you to double spend, it reduces confidence in coins you buy to zero, which reduces the value of all coins to zero. You still have your coins, but they aren't worth anything.
      - Rmilb 9y ago
        This is false, you just have to wait for more confirmations. And if miners are censoring transactions there will be a fork where you can use your coins.
      - chrisco255 9y ago
        Which is exactly why no one would spend the crazy amounts of money it takes to execute a 51% attack. It would be like self-immolation. Billions of dollars in equipment and energy and you'd have 51% of a worthless network. In practice, you would have to control much more than 51% of the network, because you'd have to catch up to the 49% that are still hashing away.
        loceng 9y ago
        Just like why no one would spend $100s of billions on wars that just perpetuate violence.. surely there's no incentive or gain they'd have by causing such disruption.
colordrops 9y ago
Just because gold is better in some ways that bitcoin doesn't invalidate the GP's point that bitcoin is better than gold in some ways. One quick example among many is that you can transfer it nearly instantaneously without geographic bounds.
justboxing 9y ago
> willybot, spoofing Interesting. First time I'm hearing about these two. Anyone know of any real life instances where someone perpetrated this w.r.t. bitcoins / crypto trading?
- hamstercat 9y ago
  Mt. Gox CEO admitted to operating a Willy Bot this summer. https://cointelegraph.com/news/mt-gox-trial-update-karpeles-admits-willy-bot-existence https://cointelegraph.com/news/mt-gox-trial-update-karpeles-...
Florin_Andrei 9y ago
> Gold is exchangeable virtually in any country and any culture regardless of how technologically advanced that society is. Your other arguments are not bad (well, it varies), but this one is very weak. You do know that a lot of 3rd world citizens now have access to cell phones? Technology is pervasive nowadays.
- notahacker 9y ago
  The fact that even millions of people who earn a BTC transaction fee per week have access to dumbphones is rather irrelevant to the observation that cultures who are resistant to banking are likely to continue to value gold jewellery over exotic computer-based financial instruments that don't look good around their neck. And that's even assuming a hypothetical world where many developing world citizens actually have practical access to BTC and local markets for exchanging BTC for goods.
dcosson 9y ago
> Gold has practical use in industry which puts lower bound on its value. How did that work out for oil a couple years ago? Yes there's some lower bound on gold, but if it turns out it's lower than you thought, or if the supply can be altered to manipulate the price and drive it even lower, it's not very useful. Given that gold prices 20 years ago were somewhere around 1/6 the maximum price in that period ($300 vs $1800), it's reasonable to assert that this lower bound on gold lower than even that. Meaning if I invest in gold and people completely lose faith in it, I could lose 85%+ of my investment. Not a very helpful safety net.
- jonas21 9y ago
  I don't think the comment you're replying to is trying to argue that gold is a particularly good investment -- just that Bitcoin is worse.
- Agathos 9y ago
  > How did that work out for oil a couple years ago? Do you think there's a new technology on the way that will increase the supply of gold the way fracking increased the supply of natural gas and oil? Fun to think about asteroid mining...
ce4 9y ago
Bitcoin has >200k [1] unconfirmed transactions in the mempool, summing up 4.3m us$ of fees alone. fee to get your transaction into the next block is around 22$ [2] right now. Starting to look less and lesser like a currency, becoming more and more a security. edit add links: [1] https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions [2]: https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/
- Retric 9y ago
  Looking less like a security and more like a scam.
  - sumedh 9y ago
    How is it a scam?
    - Retric 9y ago
      Other than a currency, what gives it value? Artworks for example are unique, but that does not inherently make them valuable.
      - adventured 9y ago
        There are many outlier things that are only of a certain value because some group of people decide that they are: art, baseball cards, collectible postage stamps, brand label clothing goods ($3,000 purses or shoes), venture capital valuations, and so on. Why is a new Ferrari so expensive? Ferrari could manufacture a lot more cars if they wanted to. They could also charge less, their margins are tremendous. It's an obvious function of supply and demand. The price is so high because people say it's worth paying that. It's that simple. If all of their customers suddenly decided it wasn't worth paying that, Ferrari would either lower their prices or go out of business. Even bond ratings are often open to significant subjectivism that can swing their value considerably. If enough people decide that a Bitcoin is worth $100,000, then that is what they will be worth. That is in fact how most things in the world are valued. Bitcoin's scarcity and the fact that in the near future it will become almost impossible to mine new coins, adds to the premise. The question is: does Bitcoin's low utility value and ease of trading in proportion to its market cap, particularly open it up to dramatic whims of the mob? Yes, which you see in its volatility. That won't change until or unless it finds greater baselining usefulness.
wyager 9y ago
> Both are in fixed quantity so none is more rare than other. Yes, gold is fixed by the limited amount of it in the world, solar system, and universe. We haven’t even mined most of the gold on earth. If you’re worried about supply shocks, gold is infinitely more vulnerable. I was going to respond to more of your points but many of them are obviously the exact opposite of true. Are you being sarcastic?
moduspol 9y ago
> Gold is far more unlikely to be made illegal by governments. Empirically this has not been the case, particularly in the US [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
- maehwasu 9y ago
  Was just about to link to this. I'd also mention that gold confiscation was heavily used by the Nazis. Gold is great as a store of value when things are good, and incredibly shitty when your government turns on you.
  - Retric 9y ago
    Unlike bitcoin the government has no way to track gold. Burry it 10 feet under your garden and it can stay there for your great grandchildren.
- adventured 9y ago
  That's a poor example, as it has in fact been the case that gold has been legal throughout the extreme majority of US history, including critically for the entire post gold standard era. Gold was partially illegal for only ~16% of US history, which fits very well with the term "unlikely."
  - moduspol 9y ago
    > far more unlikely > Empirically Bitcoin has been legal for 100% of US history.
microtherion 9y ago
> Both are in fixed quantity so none is more rare than other. "BitCoin" is just a particular name for a bunch of numbers. If every single wallet in the world disappeared today, you could restart a new block chain tomorrow, and would get numbers just as good as the bitcoins were (And in fact, the # of Bitcoins doubles every time there is a fork). Any scarcity is purely by fiat and consensus.
rsync 9y ago
"Gold is far more unlikely to be made illegal by governments" I have nothing to say about bitcoin, or cryptocurrencies, but this statement is currently false because (AFAIK) bitcoin has not been made illegal by any government, whereas gold has: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
raverbashing 9y ago
Even more than that BTC has zero value if the network stops (you could say it could have some value but "infinite illiquidity" which is basically the same)

varjag 9y ago

Should just point out that gold was made illegal in multiple cultures on several occasions.

svachalek 9y ago
Some may be surprised to learn this includes the U.S. from 1933-1974.
- Retric 9y ago
  Was not illegal to own, was illegal to hoard which is a critical difference.

milcron 9y ago

> Both are in fixed quantity so none is more rare than other. There is 80% more gold aboveground today than there was in 1980.

sytelus 9y ago
Gold exploration had been going on for thousands of years which means every new piece of gold is being discovered at much higher cost. So while supply increases, prices don't go down.
- victor106 9y ago
  Similar to BTC
  - joering2 9y ago
    Not really. If you ask your Shaman to produce a poison and send it to every gold miner in the world and as a result no new gold will be mined, you still won't dig up much by simply putting shovel in your backyard. You would have to go to the last crust level they been at and start to dig from there, which makes it incredible expensive and complicated. Meanwhile, if for any reason, including breaking a Bitcoin blockchain by state-sponsored actor (or someone powerful enough; or simply forcing ISPs to ban traffic on mining ports now that NN is gone), when miners stop or move to something else, you can pick up from where they left off of and alone mine one bitcoin a minute on your mediocre laptop. Whether someone will pick up these coins from you at $15k per pop, that's a different story.
    - bmelton 9y ago
      > or simply forcing ISPs to ban traffic on mining ports now that NN is gone If the government can force ISPs to implement content-neutral routing, what on earth would stop the government from forcing ISPs to mandate content-neutral routing for everything except mining ports, or going even further to demand that DPI be used to investigate the content of all ports to prohibit mining activity?
- 9y ago

pingec 9y ago

One disadvantage of gold I can think of is you cannot hide it in your head.

loceng 9y ago
No one can steal it from you with 50%+1 CPU resources though.
- chrisco255 9y ago
  The 51% attack allows you to double spend. It doesn't allow you to steal other people's coin.
  - lern_too_spel 9y ago
    By allowing you to double spend, it reduces confidence in coins you buy to zero, which reduces the value of all coins to zero. You still have your coins, but they aren't worth anything.
    - Rmilb 9y ago
      This is false, you just have to wait for more confirmations. And if miners are censoring transactions there will be a fork where you can use your coins.
    - chrisco255 9y ago
      Which is exactly why no one would spend the crazy amounts of money it takes to execute a 51% attack. It would be like self-immolation. Billions of dollars in equipment and energy and you'd have 51% of a worthless network. In practice, you would have to control much more than 51% of the network, because you'd have to catch up to the 49% that are still hashing away.
      - loceng 9y ago
        Just like why no one would spend $100s of billions on wars that just perpetuate violence.. surely there's no incentive or gain they'd have by causing such disruption.

colordrops 9y ago

Just because gold is better in some ways that bitcoin doesn't invalidate the GP's point that bitcoin is better than gold in some ways. One quick example among many is that you can transfer it nearly instantaneously without geographic bounds.

justboxing 9y ago

> willybot, spoofing Interesting. First time I'm hearing about these two. Anyone know of any real life instances where someone perpetrated this w.r.t. bitcoins / crypto trading?

hamstercat 9y ago
Mt. Gox CEO admitted to operating a Willy Bot this summer. https://cointelegraph.com/news/mt-gox-trial-update-karpeles-admits-willy-bot-existence https://cointelegraph.com/news/mt-gox-trial-update-karpeles-...

Florin_Andrei 9y ago

> Gold is exchangeable virtually in any country and any culture regardless of how technologically advanced that society is. Your other arguments are not bad (well, it varies), but this one is very weak. You do know that a lot of 3rd world citizens now have access to cell phones? Technology is pervasive nowadays.

notahacker 9y ago
The fact that even millions of people who earn a BTC transaction fee per week have access to dumbphones is rather irrelevant to the observation that cultures who are resistant to banking are likely to continue to value gold jewellery over exotic computer-based financial instruments that don't look good around their neck. And that's even assuming a hypothetical world where many developing world citizens actually have practical access to BTC and local markets for exchanging BTC for goods.

dcosson 9y ago

> Gold has practical use in industry which puts lower bound on its value. How did that work out for oil a couple years ago? Yes there's some lower bound on gold, but if it turns out it's lower than you thought, or if the supply can be altered to manipulate the price and drive it even lower, it's not very useful. Given that gold prices 20 years ago were somewhere around 1/6 the maximum price in that period ($300 vs $1800), it's reasonable to assert that this lower bound on gold lower than even that. Meaning if I invest in gold and people completely lose faith in it, I could lose 85%+ of my investment. Not a very helpful safety net.

jonas21 9y ago
I don't think the comment you're replying to is trying to argue that gold is a particularly good investment -- just that Bitcoin is worse.
Agathos 9y ago
> How did that work out for oil a couple years ago? Do you think there's a new technology on the way that will increase the supply of gold the way fracking increased the supply of natural gas and oil? Fun to think about asteroid mining...

ce4 9y ago

Bitcoin has >200k [1] unconfirmed transactions in the mempool, summing up 4.3m us$ of fees alone. fee to get your transaction into the next block is around 22$ [2] right now. Starting to look less and lesser like a currency, becoming more and more a security. edit add links: [1] https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions [2]: https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/

Retric 9y ago
Looking less like a security and more like a scam.
- sumedh 9y ago
  How is it a scam?
  - Retric 9y ago
    Other than a currency, what gives it value? Artworks for example are unique, but that does not inherently make them valuable.
    - adventured 9y ago
      There are many outlier things that are only of a certain value because some group of people decide that they are: art, baseball cards, collectible postage stamps, brand label clothing goods ($3,000 purses or shoes), venture capital valuations, and so on. Why is a new Ferrari so expensive? Ferrari could manufacture a lot more cars if they wanted to. They could also charge less, their margins are tremendous. It's an obvious function of supply and demand. The price is so high because people say it's worth paying that. It's that simple. If all of their customers suddenly decided it wasn't worth paying that, Ferrari would either lower their prices or go out of business. Even bond ratings are often open to significant subjectivism that can swing their value considerably. If enough people decide that a Bitcoin is worth $100,000, then that is what they will be worth. That is in fact how most things in the world are valued. Bitcoin's scarcity and the fact that in the near future it will become almost impossible to mine new coins, adds to the premise. The question is: does Bitcoin's low utility value and ease of trading in proportion to its market cap, particularly open it up to dramatic whims of the mob? Yes, which you see in its volatility. That won't change until or unless it finds greater baselining usefulness.

wyager 9y ago

> Both are in fixed quantity so none is more rare than other. Yes, gold is fixed by the limited amount of it in the world, solar system, and universe. We haven’t even mined most of the gold on earth. If you’re worried about supply shocks, gold is infinitely more vulnerable. I was going to respond to more of your points but many of them are obviously the exact opposite of true. Are you being sarcastic?

moduspol 9y ago

> Gold is far more unlikely to be made illegal by governments. Empirically this has not been the case, particularly in the US [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

maehwasu 9y ago
Was just about to link to this. I'd also mention that gold confiscation was heavily used by the Nazis. Gold is great as a store of value when things are good, and incredibly shitty when your government turns on you.
- Retric 9y ago
  Unlike bitcoin the government has no way to track gold. Burry it 10 feet under your garden and it can stay there for your great grandchildren.
adventured 9y ago
That's a poor example, as it has in fact been the case that gold has been legal throughout the extreme majority of US history, including critically for the entire post gold standard era. Gold was partially illegal for only ~16% of US history, which fits very well with the term "unlikely."
- moduspol 9y ago
  > far more unlikely > Empirically Bitcoin has been legal for 100% of US history.

microtherion 9y ago

> Both are in fixed quantity so none is more rare than other. "BitCoin" is just a particular name for a bunch of numbers. If every single wallet in the world disappeared today, you could restart a new block chain tomorrow, and would get numbers just as good as the bitcoins were (And in fact, the # of Bitcoins doubles every time there is a fork). Any scarcity is purely by fiat and consensus.

rsync 9y ago

"Gold is far more unlikely to be made illegal by governments" I have nothing to say about bitcoin, or cryptocurrencies, but this statement is currently false because (AFAIK) bitcoin has not been made illegal by any government, whereas gold has: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

raverbashing 9y ago

Even more than that BTC has zero value if the network stops (you could say it could have some value but "infinite illiquidity" which is basically the same)