5 ms·
> By that definition, gold too is a ponzi. No, gold clearly fails to satisfy that definition on two counts. > First, few if any gold investors have expectation
by bugzz 5y ago
> By that definition, gold too is a ponzi. No, gold clearly fails to satisfy that definition on two counts.
> First, few if any gold investors have expectations of profits. They generally invest in gold as a hedge -- a "store of value" -- that they hope will retain its value in case other assets go sour.
I believe Bitcoin has potential to become the "new" gold. It's better in many ways. Does that mean I can only buy Bitcoin if I want to use it as a hedge? No! I can buy it with the expectation of profit because I expect it to be commonly used as a hedge in the future, at which time it will have a much higher price and I'll have made money.
- foolfoolz 5y agogold has no value to typical people. i can’t walk into a store and buy with gold. i can’t use gold for any purpose in day to day life. it’s an asset
- Eji1700 5y agoThis is arguably the same for a majority of crypto users. I see crypto as a "digital asset". It's something you store funds in to hedge markets or get around transactional issues (either because you're doing something potentially illegal by some entities definition or because your currency is shot to shit), which basically makes it like golds or precious gems. I'm not totally sold it'll last long term, but I don't see the comparison as a huge logic leap.
- smt88 5y ago> gold has no value to typical people. The whole point of an economy is that something has value if it's valuable to someone, not just the person who's holding it. I'm not going to use a chunk of gold for anything, but it has intrinsic uses that aren't tied to being an exchange of value. It can be used to make jewelry, electronics, food, and medical devices. In some of those applications, there is no substitute for gold. Contrast that with Bitcoin, whose only value is speculative (whether people think it will increase in price). It has literally no other use or value. If the internet crashed, you couldn't sell your Bitcoin to someone to make jewelry out of it.
- hackingforfun 5y agoBitcoin is already valuable to someone, maybe not you, but someone (in fact, quite a lot of people). Many of the people that consider that Bitcoin has value don't care about gold at all, some do, some don't. By the way, these same people that don't care about gold also could give a shit less that gold can be made into jewelry (or anything else). Like you said, something has value because it's valuable to someone. I think what people need to accept is that Bitcoin, right now, is valuable to a lot of people. If the internet crashed, there's going to be much bigger problems, including accessing and transferring fiat currency. What people like about Bitcoin is that you can't print more of it without forking it, or creating your own new crypto with different rules (in contrast to potentially infinite printing and borrowing of USD). To create a viable alternative to Bitcoin (via fork or otherwise), you have to market and create the same level of trust, and convince everyone who trusts Bitcoin now to switch over.
- foolfoolz 5y agobitcoin has the same utility as paper money. that doesn’t mean it has no value
- amin 5y agoThere are many cryptocurrencies who are nearly identical to Bitcoin, except that most don't have the widespread fame and support. In 2019 alone, 90,000 new crypto-currencies were created. Yes, there will only be 21 million bitcoins, but there are already countless, nearly an infite amount of copycat coins. This is not the case with gold.
- baby 5y agoThere are plenty of other metals or “creations” like time pieces.
- seibelj 5y agoThere is silver, and platinum, and tungsten, etc. etc. It’s the same thing just in a physical format.
- bb88 5y agoThere are an infinite supply of magical numbers. There are a limited supply of precious and rare metals easily minable on earth. E.g. The price of copper has been going up over the past century (adjusted for inflation) If you want to mine more magic numbers just add another digit to the search space and you'll easily have another 10 times more numbers.
- amin 5y agoThere are good reasons why gold and silver became the main medium of exchange for thousands of years. Most other metals failed imported criteria to make them as useful for this purpose.
- bb88 5y agoI can exchange dollars for either other dollars or gold. Neither of which necessarily need the goodness (or greed) of society to constantly care and feed it. Banks existed long before the internet did, and in a post-apocalyptic crunch we could always go back.
- russianbandit 5y agoIn post-apocalyptic crunch we are likely to go back to food, water and ammo. You and I will likely be long dead before society reverts to something like gold, so I doubt gold as post-apocalyptic hedge.