[sytelus]

That's quite a balony.

- Both are in fixed quantity so none is more rare than other.

- Gold has practical use in industry which puts lower bound on its value. BTC has no lower bound.

- Gold is exchangeable virtually in any country and any culture regardless of how technologically advanced that society is.

- Thousands of years of history has proven that humans have almost natural lust for this shiny metal and it gets displayed as jewelry uses. This again further sets the lower bound for gold prices.

- Gold is not only rare but is virtually rust proof and can be stowed away without any advanced tech for 100s of years. BTC will be pointless if there was a natural or human made disaster and few people had electricity.

- Gold is far more unlikely to be made illegal by governments.

- There are no new rare metals popping up every day like whole slew of new cryptocurrencies which might fragment and trump each other. No one knows which cryptocurrency will end up dominating 10 years down the line.

- BTC has huge risk of getting stolen and hacked because someone exploiting zero day vulnerabilities in your system even if you did everything you possibly could to keep your system safe.

- Governments can start their secret operations to control the crypto market behind the scene, hack in to exchanges, find vulnerabilities or do dirty trades.

- Crypto exchanges are wild west without regulations which means clever deep pocketed traders would be exploiting them by techniques like frontrunning, wash trades, willybot, spoofing etc. This enables big investors to profit at the expense of small investors.

Above arguments should make it clear that btc has very real upper bound that it can rationally reach and its most definitely less than gold market cap. Of course, big investors can juice up things in the short term but it would be impossible to sustain irrational highs on long term.

[moduspol]

> Gold is far more unlikely to be made illegal by governments.

Empirically this has not been the case, particularly in the US [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

[maehwasu]

Was just about to link to this. I'd also mention that gold confiscation was heavily used by the Nazis.

Gold is great as a store of value when things are good, and incredibly shitty when your government turns on you.

[Retric]

Unlike bitcoin the government has no way to track gold. Burry it 10 feet under your garden and it can stay there for your great grandchildren.

[adventured]

That's a poor example, as it has in fact been the case that gold has been legal throughout the extreme majority of US history, including critically for the entire post gold standard era. Gold was partially illegal for only ~16% of US history, which fits very well with the term "unlikely."

[moduspol]

> far more unlikely

> Empirically

Bitcoin has been legal for 100% of US history.

[ce4]

Bitcoin has >200k [1] unconfirmed transactions in the mempool, summing up 4.3m us$ of fees alone. fee to get your transaction into the next block is around 22$ [2] right now.

Starting to look less and lesser like a currency, becoming more and more a security.

edit add links:

    [1] https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions
    [2]: https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/

[Retric]

Looking less like a security and more like a scam.

[sumedh]

How is it a scam?

[Retric]

Other than a currency, what gives it value? Artworks for example are unique, but that does not inherently make them valuable.

[adventured]

There are many outlier things that are only of a certain value because some group of people decide that they are: art, baseball cards, collectible postage stamps, brand label clothing goods ($3,000 purses or shoes), venture capital valuations, and so on.

Why is a new Ferrari so expensive? Ferrari could manufacture a lot more cars if they wanted to. They could also charge less, their margins are tremendous. It's an obvious function of supply and demand. The price is so high because people say it's worth paying that. It's that simple. If all of their customers suddenly decided it wasn't worth paying that, Ferrari would either lower their prices or go out of business.

Even bond ratings are often open to significant subjectivism that can swing their value considerably.

If enough people decide that a Bitcoin is worth $100,000, then that is what they will be worth. That is in fact how most things in the world are valued. Bitcoin's scarcity and the fact that in the near future it will become almost impossible to mine new coins, adds to the premise.

The question is: does Bitcoin's low utility value and ease of trading in proportion to its market cap, particularly open it up to dramatic whims of the mob? Yes, which you see in its volatility. That won't change until or unless it finds greater baselining usefulness.

[Retric]

Ferrari cars charge a premium, much like Apple does but they are a hell of a lot faster than a Honda Civic. Baseball cards started as a thing outside of rarity, they had information and a picture which was more valuable pre Internet.

Now you can argue that Antiques should not gain value from age, but old junk is not valueable, old pristine stuff is. So your argument is people overvalue something they have a rational reason to value, which is different than placing clause on something without inherent value.

I am not saying Bitcoins shpuld be worth zero today, I am saying they will be worth zero in 100 years after the fad ends unless they fix the inherent problems with the protocol so it can be used as a medium of exchange.

[sumedh]

> Other than a currency

You answered the question there is nothing more than that.

Which bring us back to the question, just because it's a currency, its a scam?

[Retric]

No, the 22+$ transaction fees are the problem. People are saying that it's no longer a currency because of them, but that just makes it a security. IMO it's currency or scam not currency or security, because there is no inherent value beyond currency.

[joering2]

That still boggles my mind. I thought the whole idea was to remove middle man that not only authorize (or not transaction) but also charge hefty fees? I was told for long time it is free to buy or sell with bitcoin. What am I missing?

[sah2ed]

The Bitcoin network doesn't do away with the concept of a middle man completely, it merely replaces one mutually trusted middle man (like the Visa card network) with several untrusted middle men (anyone that can afford a mining rig).

If one untrusted middle man produces a proof of work for a transaction request, the other untrusted middle men verify the PoW to be valid, if there is consensus §, they collectively agree to append the transaction to the next block on the blockchain. The untrusted middle man is then rewarded for their efforts by being paid the mining fee that was accruable for the transaction.

[§] If 2 or more untrusted middle men solve the PoW for a transaction request independently, i.e. they are competing to be rewarded with the same mining fee, then the untrusted middle man with the longest confirmations from other nodes on the network is the one whose block will be appended to the blockchain, the others will be discarded.

Would appreciate any corrections to my gross simplification.

[dcosson]

> Gold has practical use in industry which puts lower bound on its value.

How did that work out for oil a couple years ago?

Yes there's some lower bound on gold, but if it turns out it's lower than you thought, or if the supply can be altered to manipulate the price and drive it even lower, it's not very useful.

Given that gold prices 20 years ago were somewhere around 1/6 the maximum price in that period ($300 vs $1800), it's reasonable to assert that this lower bound on gold lower than even that. Meaning if I invest in gold and people completely lose faith in it, I could lose 85%+ of my investment. Not a very helpful safety net.

[jonas21]

I don't think the comment you're replying to is trying to argue that gold is a particularly good investment -- just that Bitcoin is worse.

[Agathos]

> How did that work out for oil a couple years ago?

Do you think there's a new technology on the way that will increase the supply of gold the way fracking increased the supply of natural gas and oil?

Fun to think about asteroid mining...

[milcron]

> Both are in fixed quantity so none is more rare than other.

There is 80% more gold aboveground today than there was in 1980.

[sytelus]

Gold exploration had been going on for thousands of years which means every new piece of gold is being discovered at much higher cost. So while supply increases, prices don't go down.

[MarkMc]

Of the additional 80% gold I'd guess about half represents profit for gold miners or tax or mining royalties. So 40% of the gold supply has come at zero marginal cost.

Also keep in mind that a technological breakthrough could produce a sudden glut in gold supply, as we have seen recently with oil and gas fracking.

The main reason the price has gone up is that the world population is in aggregate far richer than in 1980. What's more, Indians and Chinese (who are culturally inclined to invest in gold) have seen their wealth grow particularly rapidly, so the proportion of world assets stored in gold has likely increased.

[cdolan]

Is this not similar to the diminishing release of bitcoins?

[Rmilb]

Exactly the point. Satoshi created the issuance curve of Bitcoin to mirror the amount of gold that was dug up.

[MarkMc]

In the next 100 years the amount of gold above ground will triple or quadruple. Growth in Bitcoins will be far less.

[victor106]

Similar to BTC

[joering2]

Not really.

If you ask your Shaman to produce a poison and send it to every gold miner in the world and as a result no new gold will be mined, you still won't dig up much by simply putting shovel in your backyard. You would have to go to the last crust level they been at and start to dig from there, which makes it incredible expensive and complicated.

Meanwhile, if for any reason, including breaking a Bitcoin blockchain by state-sponsored actor (or someone powerful enough; or simply forcing ISPs to ban traffic on mining ports now that NN is gone), when miners stop or move to something else, you can pick up from where they left off of and alone mine one bitcoin a minute on your mediocre laptop.

Whether someone will pick up these coins from you at $15k per pop, that's a different story.

[bmelton]

> or simply forcing ISPs to ban traffic on mining ports now that NN is gone

If the government can force ISPs to implement content-neutral routing, what on earth would stop the government from forcing ISPs to mandate content-neutral routing for everything except mining ports, or going even further to demand that DPI be used to investigate the content of all ports to prohibit mining activity?

[varjag]

Should just point out that gold was made illegal in multiple cultures on several occasions.

[svachalek]

Some may be surprised to learn this includes the U.S. from 1933-1974.

[Retric]

Was not illegal to own, was illegal to hoard which is a critical difference.

[colordrops]

Just because gold is better in some ways that bitcoin doesn't invalidate the GP's point that bitcoin is better than gold in some ways. One quick example among many is that you can transfer it nearly instantaneously without geographic bounds.

[microtherion]

> Both are in fixed quantity so none is more rare than other.

"BitCoin" is just a particular name for a bunch of numbers. If every single wallet in the world disappeared today, you could restart a new block chain tomorrow, and would get numbers just as good as the bitcoins were (And in fact, the # of Bitcoins doubles every time there is a fork). Any scarcity is purely by fiat and consensus.

[pingec]

One disadvantage of gold I can think of is you cannot hide it in your head.

[loceng]

No one can steal it from you with 50%+1 CPU resources though.

[chrisco255]

The 51% attack allows you to double spend. It doesn't allow you to steal other people's coin.

[lern_too_spel]

By allowing you to double spend, it reduces confidence in coins you buy to zero, which reduces the value of all coins to zero. You still have your coins, but they aren't worth anything.

[chrisco255]

Which is exactly why no one would spend the crazy amounts of money it takes to execute a 51% attack. It would be like self-immolation. Billions of dollars in equipment and energy and you'd have 51% of a worthless network. In practice, you would have to control much more than 51% of the network, because you'd have to catch up to the 49% that are still hashing away.

[Retric]

Unless they are a government, shorted bitcoins, or own a massive stake in a competitor etc.

PS: Remember the value of Bitcoin is limited as a function of the cost of that 51% attack. If the price increases by 10x the transaction fees need to also increase by 10x or Bitcoin becomes less secure.

[joering2]

> Which is exactly why no one would spend the crazy amounts of money it takes to execute a 51% attack.

There was a recent paper shared here on an article about new type of currency or exchange system. Although I don't understand details, it explained that since 51% of coins are already mined by just a few pools, if these pools orchestrate together, then can break the chain. But unsure how true this is (cannot find the post anymore, sorry)

[loceng]

Just like why no one would spend $100s of billions on wars that just perpetuate violence.. surely there's no incentive or gain they'd have by causing such disruption.

[Rmilb]

This is false, you just have to wait for more confirmations. And if miners are censoring transactions there will be a fork where you can use your coins.

[johnhenry]

Technically, a 51% attack would allow one to confirm non-standard transactions and pretty much do anything. Granted, this would immediately be apparent to any of the other 49% of nodes and cause a fork, but still...

[option_greek]

Whats the point of that ? A miner can confirm non-standard transactions right now when he mines a block but no one would accept it. Point of 51% attack is to surreptitiously double spend and nothing else.

[tuxxy]

Have you seen how much processing power is in the Bitcoin network? Do you know how expensive an attack like this would be?

By the way, you can only double spend with the 51% attack.

[wellboy]

How expensive, $100M?

[jhall1468]

You're off by a factor of 20. The current hash rate is 17.5 million terahashes per second. Ant Antminer S9 goes for $2800 and produces 13.5 terahashes per second. In order to get to 51%, you'd need a $2 billion dollar investment.

[loceng]

How much is spent on war directly (that we know about) every year globally?

[wellboy]

Interesting, how much would it be say on Bitcoin Cash?

[keypress]

Teeth?

[dmichulke]

Rather inconvenient for bigger stacks.

Might be popular with the ladies, though.

[akhatri_aus]

You can hide the keys to it in your head. You can store it in a passworded safe.

[15155]

The key difference is that those physical assets do not die with you.

They exist in that safe until someone with a plasma cutter or a Hilti coring rig takes it from you.

[QAPereo]

Rubber hose...

[justboxing]

> willybot, spoofing

Interesting. First time I'm hearing about these two. Anyone know of any real life instances where someone perpetrated this w.r.t. bitcoins / crypto trading?

[hamstercat]

Mt. Gox CEO admitted to operating a Willy Bot this summer.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/mt-gox-trial-update-karpeles-...

[rsync]

"Gold is far more unlikely to be made illegal by governments"

I have nothing to say about bitcoin, or cryptocurrencies, but this statement is currently false because (AFAIK) bitcoin has not been made illegal by any government, whereas gold has:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

[wyager]

> Both are in fixed quantity so none is more rare than other.

Yes, gold is fixed by the limited amount of it in the world, solar system, and universe. We haven’t even mined most of the gold on earth. If you’re worried about supply shocks, gold is infinitely more vulnerable.

I was going to respond to more of your points but many of them are obviously the exact opposite of true. Are you being sarcastic?

[Florin_Andrei]

> Gold is exchangeable virtually in any country and any culture regardless of how technologically advanced that society is.

Your other arguments are not bad (well, it varies), but this one is very weak. You do know that a lot of 3rd world citizens now have access to cell phones? Technology is pervasive nowadays.

[notahacker]

The fact that even millions of people who earn a BTC transaction fee per week have access to dumbphones is rather irrelevant to the observation that cultures who are resistant to banking are likely to continue to value gold jewellery over exotic computer-based financial instruments that don't look good around their neck. And that's even assuming a hypothetical world where many developing world citizens actually have practical access to BTC and local markets for exchanging BTC for goods.

[raverbashing]

Even more than that

BTC has zero value if the network stops (you could say it could have some value but "infinite illiquidity" which is basically the same)