> Gold expends energy to mine but is essentially free to store, bitcoin costs money to store proportional to its market price. It's not really that simple. The

> Gold expends energy to mine but is essentially free to store, bitcoin costs money to store proportional to its market price. It's not really that simple. There is a different breakdown when you look at individual vs global costs. There is a cost to an individual for storing gold - e.g. building a vault, hiring a guard etc. This cost was the original incentive scheme behind the early banks - if we pool our gold storage then we can pool our security costs. Beyond that individual cost there is no additional global cost for storage. Bitcoin is free to store for an individual. Once funds are stored at an address in the blockchain they will stay there. Although the global cost is huge it is invisible at the individual level - nobody needs to participate in mining the chain to hold bitcoin. History suggests that individuals favor situations where the costs have been socialized and are not visible at the individual level.