It's nowhere close to impossible. They could jail anyone who uses it publicly. They could take over the network with > 50% computing power. They could bog down the network with DNS type attacks with too many transactions.

If it wasn't so impractical to bet that long term, your predictions are entirely laughable. Sure, it may have an impact much greater than today. Sole world currency and main store of wealth is just so far off the mark it's hilarious. Store of wealth is also quite bad as well.

Also note that a BTC is conceptually identical to a piece of gold bullion. Gold was used as currency for thousands of years because it's been the most efficient currency known. It doesn't react with anything in the natural world, so it can't be destroyed and there is a finite amount. The main advantage to use BTC over gold is that you don't have to carry a bag of bitcoins to the supermarket.

It's not conceptually identical. Gold has many properties that Bitcoin does not possess, and Bitcoin has many properties that Gold does not possess.

The main important difference is the lack of scarcity of cryptocurrencies, which includes Bitcoins. It is also possible to have a transaction in gold that doesn't rely on third parties.

Gold has inherent utility. A bitcoin does not

the fact that there are other cryptocurrencies out there doesn't matter since you can't use them to pay in bitcoins and you can't somehow "convert" or "re-code" them into bitcoins, you can only use bitcoins to pay in bitcoins. that's akin to assuming that having zimbabwe national bank print bills with too many zeroes is going to cause a noticeable inflation in all other currencies.

what utility? less than 10% of gold that is mined is actually used in industry. as for the 40% that goes for jewellry, these days it takes a jeweller to discern what is real gold, so it's not impossible that at some point in the future ppl will get reasonable and stop buying overpriced jewellry and start buying ripoffs. and if somehow we come upon large deposits of gold in the earth (like diamonds lately), it's quite possible that a gold inflation happens. most of the gold used today is used for speculation. what do you think dollar would be worth if half the money in US dollars in the world would be kept under people's matresses?

as for bitcoin, there is no possibility of inflation, since the algorithm controls the amount of bitcoins that can be mined in an amount of time. if people start mining more, it gets harder to mine bitcoins and vice versa, so a roughly constant amount of bitcoins is produced over time, generating a manageable inflation. even if nothing else, bitcoin has silk road. drugs will probably stay with us for a long time and it's arguable that a cryptocurrency is one of the easiest ways to move money untraceably

OK, sure. Another fiat currency is probably always the most likely next replacement, but it doesn't mean fiat is most likely X years into the future.

Kind of a red herring, the point is that it wouldn't actually come to this.

The government depends on the illusion of not being a gang of bandits. They can't just boorishly destroy things whenever they want and maintain an air of legitimacy. They're gonna blink before this goes back and forth a bunch of times.

How could they possibly miss the threat if your first 2 sentences are true? Why not destroy it plenty in advance just in case?

Easily? That seems really cumbersome.

Do people inspect and weigh the gold themselves whenever they accept it? Or is the idea that companies produce the note it's attached to, and people recognize the note the way you would a dollar, and trust the company? And there's some way to stop people from scraping away at it?

Seems like such a borderline profit margin (assuming it's actually profitable), to produce the notes. And then these are the people you have to trust not to counterfeit.

And of course, you have to physically mail it to pay people in other parts of the world.

No matter how you slice it (literally, lol), passing rocks around really doesn't seem like a good way to make payments to me. Maybe in year 1536, not now. Sure you can do it, I can pay for something using my bicycle if I try hard enough.

You can hold a wallet for accepting payments without leaving your net worth there.

But ya, you might choose to trust your bitcoins with a 3rd party. I pretty much do that with all of my bitcoins now (between e-wallets and poker sites and other things I use). Never been burned. Not sure what you're getting at, but that's different than trusting someone to actually issue the currency.

I think gold and utility doesn't add up. Gold is just gold, was the best currency. Utility is marginal.

This statement is true if the likelihood of war is lower than likelihood of discovering large deposit of gold in hearth. Why? Just because when you have war, your bitcoin is destroyed (if I understand it correctly). Gold is going to survive pretty much everything. Maybe just ownership is going to change but still going to stay in this planet no matter what.
If likelihood of war is higher than discovering large amounts of gold in earth then likelihood of bitcoin failing is higher so your logic is flawed.
Somehow I don't see how war is less likely than discovery of large amounts of gold. Over the years there was many wars but haven't heard of discovering ridic amounts of gold that caused massive inflation (didn't check that obv, seems obvious).

If a paper note/digital dollar is 100% backed by gold, you can do everything electronically the same way you do it with bitcoin. Then you can keep physical gold in a safe place if u decide to store wealth. Yeah, it's not as perfect but digital currency has bigger downside which I mentioned in previous post. It'll not survive the worst times (war). Everything looks perfect on paper with bitcoin up until u start losing your digital world. You can't argue with that. No matter what happens (nuclear war, whatever). Gold will stay. Bitcoin will fail. Therefore, gold will win in the end. You can't change that.

Except you have to trust somebody to hold the gold.

You're changing the subject (just fyi, in case you didn't realize that). He's talking about using physical gold, not using notes/e-notes redeemable for gold.

OK, you can do this regardless of what you use as currency.

lol, if the world gets blown up so bad that Bitcoin is physically destroyed, I don't think we'll be around to know the difference.

(A lot harder if not impossible to have that war btw without centralized currency.)

Who cares if you can pay in Bitcoins or not? I can't pay for something in dollars with Euros, yet both exist.

The value of money comes from the value it provides. When there is competition, there is less value by each competitor. This is simple economics. When there are alternatives, the value of something drops.

And it of course doesn't mean Bitcoin is the most likely.


Not really. People are very sheepish and will believe a lot of lies. Bitcoin is the currency of terrorists or child pornographers, etc... Governments have done much more sinister things before and suceeded.

Because it's probably not even a threat. And what's to say it isn't already ready to destroy it?

The gold would be embedded and impossible to scrape away. You trust the bill, but if you don't, you buy a machine that can easily test it.

There is no need to trust, only verify. You have the gold. The cost is not that significant.


Obviously you don't use it for those types of transactions. Trusted 3rd parties FTW.


I agree! That's why banks can exist. But if you are paranoid, you can be paranoid.


Trusting any significant amount of net worth to the Mickey Mouse Bitcoin operations out there now seems incredibly stupid, especially with complete lack of recourse when theft occurs and how incompetent 99% of the Bitcoin operators are.

I've claimed before that e-notes backed by gold are essentially the same so I treat it the same, cause didn't see anyone proving me wrong on this one.

Yes, you have to trust somebody to hold the gold. What's the problem with it? I get that bitcoins will always be genuine this way but IMHO it's not as bad as having currency easily "deletable" from the media. That's a big red flag for me.

Are you saying hard drive failure doesn't lead to permanent loss of my bitcoins? You're making it sound like you need a ton of force to destroy it.
You don't need world blow up to lose bitcoins. Cause u don't see what's happening around the world at the moment doesn't mean you're right. Wars are happening as we speak in some places in the world. If you were from one of those countries at war right now you wouldn't be saying such things. Your bitcoins would have hard time surviving too. Read about the situation in the world and who doesn't like who. If you think situation is stable at the moment then you're far from truth. Bitcoin would be perfect, if there was a perfect world for it and everything run smooth.

To the point. It'll not survive just because wars happen from time to time. They don't kill all the ppl on earth so in the end it will lose to physical gold which will stay and is going to be used again and again. It's happened before and it's going to happen again. Bitcoin even though is a great idea it lacks one of the crucial feature for perfect money- it's not hard to destroy.

If you are paranoid about war, it's possible to write down the private keys of your wallet and have access to them. But the network to spend them might be destroyed in an all out catastophe. But Gold isn't going to do you any good then either. Guns, ammo, and toothpaste will have more value.

Not paranoid about war. Just see what's happening right now. How would bitcoin exist in Iraq right now for example?? Didn't happen in your country so you're fine, but if u were from iraq, that's a different story now, isn't it?
We're talking about money. Gunns, ammo aren't. Though, the most desirable at war for obvious reasons. What would you use to buy those? Bitcoins?? haha. Wonder how without internet connection or even electricity. With gold you have non zero chance, you get something for it. With bitcoins you have 0 chance.
Also if u know u gonna get killed anyway if u want to buy something with it, u can hide it and when somehow u survive + times are better gold is still going to be there to sell it for something.
The point is, with physical gold you've got much more time to buy necessary things, therefore more chance of surviving. With bitcoins power outage makes u dead + it it's very hard to get them through the war. Gold has no problem with it.
Conclusion is gold will last much much longer then perfect bitcoin no matter how much you glorify it. You can't deny that.

I'm becoming fascinated by bitcoins because there are a lot of paradoxal ideas associated with them The more society advances, the more utility bitcoins will have. If you are betting on bitcoins you are basically betting on the advancement of the human race.

It's such a simple idea and yet it has the power to reorganize the power and banking structure of society. Consider that if a government entity tried to eradicate it, it would have to be the size of the entire world, yet a world-wide central government would have the most need for bitcoins.

Instead of talking about whether or not bitcoins will survive we should be talking about what society will look like if bitcoins were the dominant world currency. Would there be a need for a fractured banking system? What would be the size of the US government and how would it's role change?

If I could bet I would lay even money that bitcoins outlast USD.

This thread turned weird.

If bitcoin turns out to beat fiat in Zombie apocalypse scenarios, then it's not going to grow too much. It needs to be useful in other ways before it will become popular. If it's useful in a disaster scenario, that's just a side benefit.

Interesting point. I like it, however human race is going the opposite way IMHO. So I think it's a bad bet. Watch news to understand why I think that way (I don't watch TV, just assuming they're showing the trend of the world ).

It's somebody's promise to give you gold, rather than gold itself.

Maybe it's worth something to you, maybe it isn't. But strictly speaking it's not gold. It's a promise to give you gold.

Throughout history this has gone poorly.

Note that there's a difference between trusting someone to store gold for you, and trusting someone to store the gold reserves to backup a currency. A currency only works if it's widely recognized, so you can't have hundreds of thousands of different notes floating around. You have to condense a massive amount of wealth into one centralized location (or a few of them) in order to have a backed currency.

Even if somehow you could find the best people ever to be in charge, they can get threatened and manipulated (they can die, then who do you trust). When you concentrate that much in one place, it's begging a transfer of wealth from average people to the most corrupt.

I'm saying if my hard drive gets blown-up, I probably do too. If a war breaks out and it's really important to me not to lose any bitcoins, I can keep them all on a disk on my person. Then if they get blown-up, it's irrelevant.

Better yet I can transfer some to a friend or a service I trust that stores their bitcoins outside of the war zone. Or maybe even buy gold with them, if I don't need them for sending payments while the war is going on.

(Regardless, war isn't happening when people stop using centralized currencies.)

I've never claimed that, maybe you should post this line a few more times though.

Lol OK, move the goal posts again.

If you want to talk about banks, talk about banks. You posted about strips of gold embedded into bills. I replied. (And you apparently agree that it's not a good idea.) I don't know how that makes me paranoid of banks, lol.

Discussion started by my stating gold is superior to bitcoin, because it's hard to destroy. Said that, because the rest of the features of gold and bitcoins are the same imho (like divisibility, transportability, noncounterfeitability). This is assuming bitcoins gets recognizable as much as gold, because it's obviously not the case now.

Yeah I understand that, but the idea with gold is like with bitcoins. You keep your net worth separately in physical gold wherever you want. It's not centralized. Then for those purchases you want to make you just exchange some gold for backed currency. Although, not perfect, but near to it, because the only time you lose is if you happen to exchange gold to a 3rd party and at the same time 3rd party goes busto or whatever. Same idea you explained with bitcoins, you keep net worth separately if you want and in a safe place but use 3rd party for transactions. You can lose small amount if 3rd party goes rogue.
How is that different from each other.


Harddrive blowing up doesn't imply you blowing up (it depends on a lot of factors. Fe. harddrive might have been just faulty, there is no war ). Also in war conditions is much harder to say: "hey, got bitcoins, wanna buy a gun", just because of the much higher probability of not having means to transfer those bitcoins. They'll be more times useless at war zone than gold assuming someone wants both in the warzone. In addition Gold has thousands of years proved data that ppl want it to some extent all the time. May not be the case with bitcoins. 0 track record. It's just basically not proved theory.

If you think that the human race is going the opposite way then for sure gold>bitcoins but remember that the human mind is wired to examine small sample sizes. Even if life isn't as good as it was, say, 6 years ago, the quality of life has improved for each successive generation since the last world population boom (i think it was caused by the domestication of the potato actually but that's another thread)

Think of all the things you enjoy today, like cell phones and heck, cable television that your parents didn't enjoy when they were your age? It's a pretty good bet that your children will have something you didn't have and you will be jealous. Even though there are many setbacks that seem like mankind is -ev, the longterm effect is +ev

oh and this is actually one of the most fascinating features imo and I like using the word granularity coz it's a little more precise...we use dollars and cents as a representation of wealth precisely because of the non-granularity of gold...if gold were infinitely granular there wouldn't be a need for paper money

and yet the more granular a currency is, the more social equality there is....the price of an apple would merge to exactly the same price around the globe and would be worth almost exactly what an apple is worth vs the world GDP

I don't want to get too freaky weird philosophical here but you can argue that the reason there are countries in the first place is to unify the currency and make the price of an apple close to the same at every location within a countries borders. Would there be a need for borders with a bitcoin society?

Yeah, I agree life has improved overall but you can't say we're on the same trend when everything around is going down nowadays. Corruption, socialism, countries going bankrupt one after another, debt going up to the roof, quality of life going down every day, inflation going up to the roof, war. You can pretend you don't see it, yes. You can think it'll turn around, yes, there is non zero chance for it. If you look around though, you have to either deny the reality or bet against the odds.

but gold is easily dividable or am I missing something? For example for really small amounts you make a coin with small amount of gold in it and the rest from a different metal. For things like cents, which are essentially worthless u put the cheapest metal possible or whatever. It's not a problem at all.

What about the gold society. Metal which has thousands years of proven track record and was used by many countries in the past.
If you think about it. Banking system is saying that gold is BS yet all banks have it and buy it... there is a reason for it. IRC Saudi Arabia doesn't accept anything other than gold from the USA for their oil (at least it was the case not so long ago, not sure about now). It's already in use between banks internationally. This metal is just special.