[mikeash]

It seems like a bad comparison, since you don’t need to mine gold just to move it around. Transferring ownership can be accomplished for the amount of energy it takes to send a small electronic message.

[vasilipupkin]

to move it around you need trucks which use gasoline

[mikeash]

You don’t need to move it to transfer ownership of it.

[vasilipupkin]

by that logic, same thing applies to bitcoin. on a centralized exchange ownershp is just an entry in the database

[mikeash]

It would apply to bitcoin if that were the usual way to transfer it, but it doesn’t look like that’s the case.

[vasilipupkin]

what do you mean? most bitcoin volume is done on centralized exchanges, so that's exactly the usual way of trading it.

[mikeash]

From some quick searching around, volume on the exchanges is around 500,000/day while volume on the blockchain is over a million. If that’s accurate (and it may not be, I’m not an expert on this and the sources I found might suck) then most volume is on the blockchain by a pretty good margin.

I don’t know how much gold is actually shifted around physically, but the trading volume in a year is several times the actual amount of gold that has been mined, so I suspect the proportion of that which involves physical movement is tiny.