I disagree, people have been hoarding gold to hold value for longer than written history. If you completely separated the value of gold from gold like people try to do with bitcoin it would be a metal somewhat useful in some electronics and jewelry. It’s not even that rare compared to what it’s useful for creating.

So it looks like the Charlie Lee Rodger Ver 250 BTC a man bet is booked. ****ing crazy.

It’s currently way to expensive to use bitcoin as currency because of the blockchain. Bitcoin needs to be faster and more efficient to be used as currency in day to day operations especially if it has to compete with other crypto. You can read about lightning networks where smaller transactions would be stored in groups instead of single transactions.

I am curious to see these figures. Looking at the 20yr graph of GLD/USD, it actually looks quite similar to Bitcoin, over an +10 year time frame. But if you have data proving that price movements correspond to an increase of demand for jewelry and ornamentation, please share it.

You don't think Bitcoin has a secondary demand? I can name 5 off the top of my ahead, granted all are illegal or fall into grey areas of the law.

Over 50% of gold mined each year goes to jewelry. There is insatiable demand even at high price points. Nearly 2/3 of all gold above ground is industrial and jewelry. That's the demand and value driver and always has been. The idea that something would be a store of value without being demanded in the majority for a primary activity/desire is absurd.



Yes, Bitcoin has secondary demand via illegal activities. Maybe worth a market cap of a few billion. Everything on top of that is a kind of pyramid/ponzi/speculative bubble.

People favorably comparing bitcoin with gold as a value store proposition have lost their minds imo.

There's an argument to be made for Bitcoin as a potential store of value / wealth saver for citizens of countries that see their fiat go into hyperinflation or have shady government rulings (like India's president banning certain denomination of bills and giving citizens no-time to make the exchange).

If people learn from Venezuala and worry about their own currency...digital currency seems the faster form of exchange for fleeing from a rapidly devaluing currency that can be used globally.

Your logic on gold/jewelry is a little flawed. You’re saying gold is valuable because they make jewelry of of it. I’m saying they make jewelry out of gold because it’s valuable.

This.

i don't think it's that they have lost their minds, it's that they are desperately grasping at any reason to back up the price of BTC.

another reason it's a hilarious comparison is because gold is in a bit of a bubble too. i remember from when i was a kid, platinum was always more expensive than gold. today, it's not. platinum is more rare than gold and it might be more useful. so clearly the price of gold is inflated by speculation, investment, etc. except, when the gold bubble bursts people will still want gold for their micro conductors or whatever.

after the bitcoin bubble, people might still want bitcoin for their online heroin purchases, but people were buying drugs online with bitcoin when it was $10 each.

you're kind of misrepresenting what he's saying here.

yes, they make jewelry out of gold because it's valuable. but the reason gold jewelry is valuable is not exactly logical. it's a status symbol.

how much is the mona lisa worth? practically nothing. i wouldn't hang it in my house. it's just a painting.

on the other hand, it's so valuable that you can't even coherently assign a price to it. if it were ever auctioned, it would fetch the GDP of a small african nation.

if/when gold jewelry falls out of fashion, you'll see the price decline. it's already falling out of fashion here, luckily they still love it in India.

bitcoin doesn't have the same kind of value that gold and the mona lisa does. bitcoin isn't a status symbol. it doesn't have an important application, and if it did, i could create a carbon copy for free.

it's valuable because if i want it today, it's $6000. and the last guy paid $5990 for it. and the guy before him paid $5980. and the guy before him paid $5970. and so on. all the way back to 10 cents or whatever the opening price was. it's been one huge speculation bubble ever since people started using bitcoin to gamble online.

Gold is not rare. Start your backtracking.

depends what you're comparing it to

bitcoin is a commodity now? What industries use it and what do they make with it? Also, I would not really call bitcoin as a currency best of anything, as it is inferior as a currency. It is a speculative store of value without much legitimate use that has been on wild ride and is in a massive bubble.

Sorry for the derail, we should just fork everyday. Infinite value!

I used to mine gold. Gold isn't very shiny either (relatively). And ornamentation is not the cause of golds value. Historical jewelry of this sort was used as money. People wore their money.

And much of the gold worn as jewelry today can just as easily be said to be a store of value, especially in places like india. It's how they store their wealth. If gold dropped to being worthless people won't covet it as such. And it certainly could drop in this fashion if we had sudden breakthroughs in mining technology and/or if their was a better alternative for inflation hedging. All this I learned from Nick Szabo's essays on the history of gold and money. Szabo is the number one suspect for creating bitcoin.

it's a shame there's so much speculation around bitcoin because it's a really great way to pay for some illegal ass ****. it's so perfect for online poker deposits/cashouts, i don't want it to go away!

Keep backing tracking:

http://www.westcoastplacer.com/how-m...left-on-earth/

Gold's value doesn't come from its rarity. And we can compare it to things that are more rare and see this truth.

Would you like to hear from someone that knows more than you?

You are also missing that unmined (but claimed) gold is effectively stored wealth for countries.

I swear I read you say that bitcoin's supply is not capped because people can create other distinct currencies that inflate it. Did I read this?

Bitcoin's supply is unequivocally capped which is ONE of the reasons it is gaining value. I'd like to discuss some of the other reasons and why it is exactly comparable to gold. Because you two are guessing, you clearly have not read the associated literature, and you couldn't be more wrong.

But lets be gents and have some dialogue.

Its not a good idea to pay for illegal things with bitcoin. It's an immutable public ledger.

yes, thanks!

you're being a little disingenuous here. ok, i'm willing to accept there's a crapload of gold deep in the ocean and deep in the earth where we can't get to it.

so what? it's rare for now, considering how much has been mined.

Augie, you keep parroting that the only major use cases for bitcoin is illegal internet activities and it's market cap should be much smaller. Where are you getting this information? It seems to be completely false.

The key similarities between gold and bitcoin are that their supplies are relatively predictable. This makes them a good inflation hedge against our floating currencies. It MIGHT have been reasonable to call bitcoin speculative as it was bootstrapping but as it rises in market cap to rival the imf, it will put pressure on monetary policy in each respective (centrally banked country).

https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43339.pdf
The time to view bitcoin as a toy has long passed. SDRs are worth about 300 billion, bitcoin will rival this probably within 6 months or less:

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/13/bitc...arde-says.html

Gold is valuable because it is pleasing to look at and very malleable. I was originally thinking gold became valuable, because it was used to barter with and eventually became used as coins in currency, becoming wide spread. After doing some googling I see that ToothSayer is right. Gold has been used as jewelry long ago. It was used as a status symbol. It wasn't until years later that it became a currency.

Check out this read here: https://dailyhistory.org/How_Did_Gol...vilizations%3F

i like the direction this is going though. i have to go to bed but i'll pick back up tomorrow. i can't wait for this bitcoin zealot to try to convince me that gold is as common as a bucket of sand.

ok. completely false...name another use case? if it's that obvious you should have included it in your post.

That's better. Although I still don't agree with the way you put it. Technology can (and will) have a major impact on the supply and therefore value of gold. this why Szabo did a three part series on mining deep oceans and comets: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/200...ty-deep-i.html

It is also why Satoshi explained "The price of any commodity tends towards its cost of production"

Historically, recently, this isn't true in regard to gold, because it served also as an inflation hedge. When our currencies are unstable and are devalued, golds price skyrockets. But Satoshi alluded to a time when gold was not to be relevant in this way. So does Szabo.

The relevant point about gold's supply can be found here:

It's supply is naturally throttled by the cost of digging it up. This in contrast to bitcoin. If a bunch of mining power all of a sudden jumps on the network, the difficult increases and thus the supply is not affected.

The mechanism is different but the result is the same, the supply is predictable.

Gold and bitcoin are identical in for the reason we value gold as an inflation hedge: the supply is predictable. And bitcoin is far more predictable for reasons stated and linked to above.

You have never been exposed to the proper argument augie.