[ErikAugust]

You say 21M "cryptocoins" but you couldn't, however, create 21M BTC arbitrarily.

As long as that number stays the same (it isn't completely immutable) then BTC has real scarcity - making it a store of value, like gold. Throw in some additional properties that BTC has that gold does not, and an argument can be made that BTC is at least a decent value store.

Even at $100,000/BTC, Bitcoin would still have a ~1/5th of the market cap of all gold mined.

And in a truly universal sense - gold is made by stars. There are 100 billion stars. There's only one Satoshi in the known universe ;)

[empath75]

But there have been multiple bitcoin forks— bitcoin cash essentially doubled the amount of bitcoins in circulation.

[keymone]

Good luck buying some BCH and spending them as BTC.

[ErikAugust]

Bitcoin Cash is BCH. Bitcoin is BTC. There will only be 21M BTC. As far as I know, there will also be 21M BCH. But BCH != BTC.

[mrhappyunhappy]

Only if people use it.

[bb88]

What exactly is a BTC? BTC is man made, and depends upon computers and software. And the people who control the software can change their minds, if they so choose. So what a BTC is now, may not be what it is later, including its scarcity. See also the ETH and BTC forks.

Gold on the other hand exists naturally in nature, and doesn't change based upon someone else's whim.

So no, BTC is not like gold.

[keymone]

BTC is what the distributed consensus says BTC is. You can’t fake that without pouring billions into building up mining infrastructure to organize a 51% attack and even then the distributed consensus will simply fork around your amazing achievement of successfully doing a single double spend?

So yeah, BTC is definitely not like gold, it’s way better.

[bb88]

Well, you can't double spend gold. You either have it or your don't. And until the matter replicators come into existence, nobody can fork gold.

As to your argument for the 51%, say, Visa comes out with a fork called VisaCoin(TM) that allows one to use a visa card to make transactions directly from VisaCoin (which is a BTC fork).

So that was two to ten people, maybe and what an ad slogan?

And here's the ad slogan: "When you go to the Fog City Diner in San Francisco, take your visa card, because they don't take BTC!"

[orcasauce]

How is BTC better than gold? What can I do with a bitcoin? It's just data. It's still a fiat currency. Gold is specifically not a fiat currency because it has real world applications. I will agree cryptocurrencies are better than other forms of fiat currency in that there is a definitive quantity, similar to a non-fiat currency, but it's intrinsic value is in the trust others will accept it in exchange for something that has real value.

Suppose a solar flare destroyed all existing digital equipment. What would a physical printout of a wallet be worth?

[keymone]

Bitcoin is better than gold because in virtually all aspects

- it’s scarce by design, not by our belief in inability to find more of it on this planet or some asteroid

- it’s mobile, transporting gold is pain in the ass

- it’s secure, securing a little piece of paper is easier than deposit of gold

- it’s divisible, sividing gold into nanograms is not practical

- it has transaction platform built in

As for practical application of gold - it’s not where gold’s value is derived from.

And what if an asteroid hits the earth and we are all dead?

[bb88]

This kind of gets into some philosophical points, so I'll take them 1 by 1.

> it’s scarce by design, not by our belief in inability to find more of it on this planet or some asteroid

Scarcity is ironically one of the reasons gold is treasured. It's a natural scarcity not a man made scarcity.

> it’s mobile, transporting gold is pain in the ass.

Most gold exchanges don't require you to physically take gold home with you. It's stored in a vault and traded like any other security.

> it’s secure, securing a little piece of paper is easier than deposit of gold

BTC is not a piece of paper, and requires that only one person not be smart enough to break the BTC encryption model.

Gold can be stolen, but not all of it at once. But apparently BTC can be stolen too.

> it’s divisible, dividing gold into nanograms is not practical

Today's cost of gold to grams is $40.17. Practically speaking, we don't need nanograms to get to penny scale. A centigram of gold is good enough.

> it has a transaction model built in.

I hand you an ounce of gold. You give me $1000 dollars or something else in value that I want. That transaction method has been trusted for eons now.

[Fjolsvith]

> Suppose a solar flare destroyed all existing digital equipment.

Suppose someone invents a way to turn lead into gold?

[gbear605]

One of these things is not like the other!

[Fjolsvith]

In their absurdity they are. Oh, and in the way that the two events would wipe out the function of a store of value for bitcoin and gold, respectively.

[pellucide]

how exactly does this happen. This has to involve protocol change or is there something in bitcoin protocol that forks around a chain when a double spend is detected. And how exactly is a double spend detected ?

[keymone]

Diuble spend is detected when a longer chain is published to contest the currently accepted chain with orphan depth of more than 5-6. This is huge deal and will decimate butcoin valuation for sure, but just as with acceptance of segwit and hardforks around protocol bugs in the past - there can be agreement made to deploy a version of bitcoin software to hardcode which chain is valid.

Not saying this is easy but when the project is attacked like that, there will be some action.

[coolspot]

By "distributed consensus" you mean couple chinese guys who own all bitcoin mining?

[keymone]

Bitcoin mining is fairly diversified, with new players about to enter hardware business.

[placeybordeaux]

If we decide to say that iron is gold as well then we have created more gold on our whim.

Bitcoin is defined as having only 21 Million tokens in supply. Until the majority of people change their belief in that it will have that many.

[bb88]

The idea of what BTC is controlled by a dev core of several thousand developers.

The idea of what Gold is is controlled by 6 billion people.