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I agree with your point, but consider the following: 1: Cryptocurrencies can still operate over distributed mesh networks or sneaker-nets in a semi-doomsday sc

I agree with your point, but consider the following: 1: Cryptocurrencies can still operate over distributed mesh networks or sneaker-nets in a semi-doomsday scenario. 2: With gold, it is difficult to verify its authenticity vs some impostor alloy without the necessary tech/knowledge. Edit: the bottom line is that in a doomsday scenario, people have little use for bitcoins or shiny yellow rocks.

ludston 4y ago
You can verify gold with a vessel of water, an already verified piece of gold and a set of scales. It's taught in story form to primary age children with the famous quote "Eureka I found it!"
- cowtools 4y ago
  Interesting point. I don't have any comment, but it looks like this guy disagrees with you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31933490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31933490
- datadata 4y ago
  For daily transactions at the current gold price, it would be extremely hard to do this sort of measurement that way with any precision without very specialized equipment. A gram of gold (around $60) is a reasonable daily transaction size and has a volume of 0.05ml. In order to distinguish metals of similar densities, you'd have to be able to measure just a fraction of that volume accurately. Maybe there is some clever system to scale this down, but wasn't obvious to me.
  - ludston 4y ago
    Well one historic way of doing this, was instead of trading directly in minute quantities of gold, people would store larger amounts of gold in a bank and trade contracts that represent certain fractions of what is stored. This was called "currency".
nradov 4y ago
We have never seen a distributed mesh network that worked correctly in the real world at scale. The OLPC project tried doing that but ran into severe technical problems. So it's not necessarily impossible, but I simply don't believe we will have an operating mesh network in that scenario. https://wiki.laptop.org/go/Mesh_Network_Details https://wiki.laptop.org/go/Mesh_Network_Details

ludston 4y ago

You can verify gold with a vessel of water, an already verified piece of gold and a set of scales. It's taught in story form to primary age children with the famous quote "Eureka I found it!"

cowtools 4y ago
Interesting point. I don't have any comment, but it looks like this guy disagrees with you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31933490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31933490
datadata 4y ago
For daily transactions at the current gold price, it would be extremely hard to do this sort of measurement that way with any precision without very specialized equipment. A gram of gold (around $60) is a reasonable daily transaction size and has a volume of 0.05ml. In order to distinguish metals of similar densities, you'd have to be able to measure just a fraction of that volume accurately. Maybe there is some clever system to scale this down, but wasn't obvious to me.
- ludston 4y ago
  Well one historic way of doing this, was instead of trading directly in minute quantities of gold, people would store larger amounts of gold in a bank and trade contracts that represent certain fractions of what is stored. This was called "currency".

nradov 4y ago

We have never seen a distributed mesh network that worked correctly in the real world at scale. The OLPC project tried doing that but ran into severe technical problems. So it's not necessarily impossible, but I simply don't believe we will have an operating mesh network in that scenario. https://wiki.laptop.org/go/Mesh_Network_Details https://wiki.laptop.org/go/Mesh_Network_Details