>The USA golds 8000 tons of gold in Fort Knox (and in NYC's Federal Reserve building). Why? Why does it do this? It must cost a lot to hold all that gold. The r

>The USA golds 8000 tons of gold in Fort Knox (and in NYC's Federal Reserve building). Why? Why does it do this? It must cost a lot to hold all that gold. The reason it does is because that gold implicitly (but not explicitly) backs the US dollar. If the dollar began crashing tomorrow, Obama could go on TV and say he was opening the vaults of Fort Knox and would exchange dollars for gold. Seriously? Those 8000 tons of gold, priced at today’s price of 1144.45 as of a few minutes ago, have a value of $296,002,697,361.7893--a little under $300 billion. Sorry, but $300 billion just isn’t a lot of money in the grand scheme of things. To put that in perspective, the market capitalization of just one company (Apple) is just over $723 billion dollars. The gross domestic product (GDP) of the United States is over $17 trillion. If we have some kind of financial crisis, $300 billion in gold (obviously the price would increase in the event of a real crisis) isn’t going to go very far in a $17 trillion dollar economy. The point: the dollar isn’t backed in any way, shape or form by the gold the U.S. holds. We should be more concerned about the dollar than bitcoin—$100 in 1900 was worth only $3.48(!) in 2012: http://observationsandnotes.blogspot.com/2011/04/100-year-declining-value-of-us-dollar.html http://observationsandnotes.blogspot.com/2011/04/100-year-de... History shows us that all fiat currencies (so far) eventually go to zero. Final thought: Bitcoin may or may not survive long term, but not because the concept of a cryptocurrency is unsound or that blockchains don’t work. Bitcoin has proven its value is based on its usefulness and flexibility: the ability to transfer value of any amount to anyone else anywhere else in minutes without needing permission and at little or no cost. Bitcoin is the prototype, not the final product. Besides bringing blockchain technology to the world, bitcoin is an invention that can’t be uninvented now that it’s here. The same way a Mac user from 1984 might not recognize a Retina iMac today, we will have some type of cryptocurrency that will be mainstream and accepted at some point in the not too distant future. It may not be bitcoin (though it’ll still be around) but some successor that addresses some of its weaknesses and builds on its strengths. Final final thought: bitcoin is already a fairly big deal in developing countries where regular people are unbanked. It’s also a big deal in countries with unstable currencies, some of which have already gone to zero once or twice: http://bitcoinfilm.org/documentaries/ http://bitcoinfilm.org/documentaries/.