I’ve never liked the idea of investing in gold, purely for the fact that I could see a big disruption happening to it in my lifetime. Asteroid mining, some advance in fusion that makes “alchemy” commercially viable, etc.
I don’t trust Bitcoin either, of course. If something were to happen to Coinbase or some attack on the network itself it could tank awfully quickly.
If something were to happen to Coinbase or some attack on the network itself it could tank awfully quickly.
Coinbase is just an exchange; plenty of them have come and gone since bitcoin has been around. Mt. Gox was much bigger on a percentage basis than Coinbase is now when it went out of business. There are plenty of other exchanges and other ways for people to buy and sell bitcoin [1][2].
Bitcoin is a global network of tens of thousands of full nodes verifying the block chain and miners; there's no feasible attack for this.
It's been 12 years; I'm sure it's been attacked every which way possible in that time. The only way you can stop bitcoin is to shutdown the internet and that's not going to happen.
One mantra in the Bitcoin community to live by: "Not your keys, not your bitcoin."
Anyone with a substantial amount of bitcoin should transfer them from an exchange (or Cash App or PayPal) to a wallet they control, which isn't that difficult. There are plenty of hardware wallets to enable this and n of m multisig solutions, so there isn't a single point of failure.
Ha. "went out of business" is code for "had its entire deposits embezzled".
It matters not if there are other exchanges, if your bitcoins are on the next exchange to disappear without a trace. That happens enough times, the money folks will give up. Leaving it to hobbyists I suppose
Gold isn't easily divisible. You can't use gold for daily transactions. People do and have used Bitcoin to buy the proverbial cup of coffee.
Gold isn't easily transportable. If you had $100,000 in gold and wanted to leave the country with it, that would be quite a hassle.
A bitcoin wallet can live on your smartphone or a USB stick. Or you can memorize 12 words and gain access to your wallet anywhere there's an internet connection.
If you wanted to send $1000 of your gold somewhere, that's another hassle.
A bitcoin transaction can be sent in minutes anywhere in the world.
The supply of gold grows each year; the higher the price goes, the more gold is produced, therefore decreasing gold's buying power.
Bitcoin is on a fixed schedule that can't be changed. There will only ever be 21 million bitcoin, making each one that much more valuable.
I don’t trust Bitcoin either, of course. If something were to happen to Coinbase or some attack on the network itself it could tank awfully quickly.