Yes and no. The rules governing bitcoin are chosen by a very large number of human beings, with a lot of commitment (not just a vote, but with substantial amoun

Yes and no. The rules governing bitcoin are chosen by a very large number of human beings, with a lot of commitment (not just a vote, but with substantial amounts of their money). The rules make bitcoin very close to ideally hard money, better than anything nature has provided directly because nature's constrained by limitations of the physical world. The majority of the commitment is because of these very rules, and so the rules can no longer be changed, except for widely agreed changes that would make it even harder. Not only that, but harder money (i.e. low supply inflation) will always go up in price relative to softer money, all else being equal. Even if someone introduced a new version of bitcoin that was softer money AND managed to convince a majority to upgrade to it (practically impossible unless by mistake), the previous version would ultimately still prevail as people realised it was harder and switched back to it, just as more and more value is flowing out of fiat currencies, real estate, gold etc into bitcoin. The genie is out of the bottle now. So the answer really is that both are governed by rules no one can change and the rules governing bitcoin issuance are by far superior (perfectly predictable issuance tending to zero). And my questions about gold were hypothetically supposing that we could change the rules governing its issuance. Feel free to have a think about them and leave your comments.