4 ms·

Thanks for the comment - My hypothesis is that people growing up today in their 20s and 30s who would have normally bought gold in their 40s and 50s will buy cr

Thanks for the comment - My hypothesis is that people growing up today in their 20s and 30s who would have normally bought gold in their 40s and 50s will buy crypto instead. So it will be a generational shift versus a replacement for existing older gold holders. (Could be wrong of course).

zechs 8y ago
Isn't that a big shift to expect given gold's track record as a store of value going back to almost the beginning of recorded history?
- eladgil 8y ago
  It is a big shift and I could be wrong. However, horses are also something we used for transportation going back to the beginning of recorded history... (lots of other examples too). Crypto has a lot of aspects that make for a superior store of value (easy to move, seizure and censorship proof etc). Obviously, also has some drawbacks too like difficulty to custody...
  - kamarg 8y ago
    I feel like the recent 51% attack against Etherium shows that seizure and censorship proof isn't strictly true.
    - wmf 8y ago
      Note that there was a 51% attack against ETC which is not Ethereum (ETH). ETC already had very little usage and was known to be insecure before the attack.
    - tuesdayrain 8y ago
      Probably less than 0.001% of the population considers ETC to be the "real Ethereum"
      - kamarg 8y ago
        That may be the case but don't pretty much all coins have this potential issue?
mattnewton 8y ago
I don’t buy it - gold has a natural floor, for one thing. I can sell it to make pretty earrings or fancy computer cables. The risk of it losing all its value is basically the risk that we will move to a post-scarcity Star Trek style society with matter replicators. Crypto.. not so much.
- gfodor 8y ago
  Why does this floor influence your choice to purchase it over some other commodity to store value (crypto or otherwise?) What do you think that floor even is? (My working assumption right now is gold could lose 99.9% of its value if it was priced based upon it's utility as a metal and not as a culturally agreed upon store of capital.)
  - sf_rob 8y ago
    I would think that most people buy gold as a safe-haven investment, so in this case its floor and/or non-correlation would be very important.
    - nostrademons 8y ago
      So your logic is that "people buy gold because other people believe it's a safe investment"? That same logic applies to crypto - if people stop believing that gold is a good investment and start believing that crypto is a good investment, gold will cease to be a good investment and crypto will become a good investment. I think gfodor is asking something more along the lines with "What can you do with gold that you cannot do with anything else you can buy?" There are valid answers to that - gold is a catalyst in several chemical reactions that won't work with any other metal, it's corrosion resistant, it's shiny, it's a very good conductor that's quite malleable. But I'm with him in surmising that if people only used gold for its metallurgical properties, absent any historical sentimental attachment, the price would drop 99.9%. Gold is actually quite abundant; 190kt have been mined so far [1], most of which is either locked up in jewelry or being hoarded as an investment, so if people ceased to believe it was valuable there'd be a very large oversupply for the few real industrial uses. [1] https://www.gold.org/about-gold/gold-supply/gold-mining/how-much-gold https://www.gold.org/about-gold/gold-supply/gold-mining/how-...

zechs 8y ago

Isn't that a big shift to expect given gold's track record as a store of value going back to almost the beginning of recorded history?

eladgil 8y ago
It is a big shift and I could be wrong. However, horses are also something we used for transportation going back to the beginning of recorded history... (lots of other examples too). Crypto has a lot of aspects that make for a superior store of value (easy to move, seizure and censorship proof etc). Obviously, also has some drawbacks too like difficulty to custody...
- kamarg 8y ago
  I feel like the recent 51% attack against Etherium shows that seizure and censorship proof isn't strictly true.
  - wmf 8y ago
    Note that there was a 51% attack against ETC which is not Ethereum (ETH). ETC already had very little usage and was known to be insecure before the attack.
  - tuesdayrain 8y ago
    Probably less than 0.001% of the population considers ETC to be the "real Ethereum"
    - kamarg 8y ago
      That may be the case but don't pretty much all coins have this potential issue?

mattnewton 8y ago

I don’t buy it - gold has a natural floor, for one thing. I can sell it to make pretty earrings or fancy computer cables. The risk of it losing all its value is basically the risk that we will move to a post-scarcity Star Trek style society with matter replicators. Crypto.. not so much.

gfodor 8y ago
Why does this floor influence your choice to purchase it over some other commodity to store value (crypto or otherwise?) What do you think that floor even is? (My working assumption right now is gold could lose 99.9% of its value if it was priced based upon it's utility as a metal and not as a culturally agreed upon store of capital.)
- sf_rob 8y ago
  I would think that most people buy gold as a safe-haven investment, so in this case its floor and/or non-correlation would be very important.
  - nostrademons 8y ago
    So your logic is that "people buy gold because other people believe it's a safe investment"? That same logic applies to crypto - if people stop believing that gold is a good investment and start believing that crypto is a good investment, gold will cease to be a good investment and crypto will become a good investment. I think gfodor is asking something more along the lines with "What can you do with gold that you cannot do with anything else you can buy?" There are valid answers to that - gold is a catalyst in several chemical reactions that won't work with any other metal, it's corrosion resistant, it's shiny, it's a very good conductor that's quite malleable. But I'm with him in surmising that if people only used gold for its metallurgical properties, absent any historical sentimental attachment, the price would drop 99.9%. Gold is actually quite abundant; 190kt have been mined so far [1], most of which is either locked up in jewelry or being hoarded as an investment, so if people ceased to believe it was valuable there'd be a very large oversupply for the few real industrial uses. [1] https://www.gold.org/about-gold/gold-supply/gold-mining/how-much-gold https://www.gold.org/about-gold/gold-supply/gold-mining/how-...