[lexapro]

You know, it's kinda funny that you mention gold bugs. Because gold shares a lot of properties with Bitcoin, and therefore should be considered a sham by most of HN. Yet somehow it sits currently at $1,670/oz and is owned by all major central banks in the world.

[JumpCrisscross]

> gold shares a lot of properties with Bitcoin, and therefore should be considered a sham by most of HN

Gold and gold buggery are separate. Gold and silver have deep precedence as money. They're also useful commodities. Gold buggery involves retail investors disproportionately allocating to gold as a buy-and-hold asset, often with emotional attachment. Those buying crypto because it's going to free the world or whatever resemble the latter.

[lexapro]

Central banks definitely don't own gold because it's such a useful commodity. Are central banks gold bugs?

[JumpCrisscross]

> Central banks definitely don't own gold because it's such a useful commodity. Are central banks gold bugs?

Are central banks retail investors? Are they buying gold to "to free the world or whatever"? No [1]?

Gold and silver have deep precedence as money. This leads to them trading as haven assets, i.e. their price rises when financial conditions deteriorate. Bitcoin doesn't. It trades as a risk asset, i.e. its price falls when financial conditions deteriorate. This could change! But that's true of literally every thing traded.

[1] https://www.bis.org/publ/work906.pdf

[ipaddr]

"Gold and silver have deep precedence as money"

Bitcoin has that rep as well.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Bitcoin has that rep as well

No, it doesn’t. The evidence is crypto trading as a risk asset. People believe it could one day trade as a haven asset, but that hasn’t happened yet. Not close.

[tim333]

>Central banks definitely don't own gold because it's such a useful commodity

It's proving quite useful to Russia's central bank which is selling gold to China as many of its other reserves have been frozen.

[aaaaaaaaata]

> gold buggery

This could be an interesting thread in itself.

[Scoundreller]

We could argue (and agree) that Canada isn’t major, but their central bank sold off their bullion gold reserves ~ 2 decades ago. And finished off its hodl of gold coins ~7 years ago.

https://www.kitco.com/news/2022-05-26/Gold-is-an-antique-ins...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/gold-canada-reserves-1.3443...

[lazide]

Canada exports large amounts of gold - it’s one of their export commodities. 14B/yr typically.

You don’t need to stick it in a bank when you’re digging it up in a those volumes every year.

[ipaddr]

Canada did it to increase diversity of investment "investing in financial assets that are easily tradable and that have deep markets of buyers and sellers"

The truth is probably based on the money they received from selling the gold as a retail coin

[rurp]

Among other reasons, it's non-trivial to walk off with $10M worth of solid gold owned by someone on another continent.

[lexapro]

It's also non-trivial to guess a private key or to run a 51% attack.

[rurp]

Judging from empirical results it is quite easy to steal crypto currency; it happens all the time. I don't know why you only care about those two approaches.

[lexapro]

Because leaving Bitcoin on a hot wallet, which is the source of most of these hacks, is like leaving gold bars on a park bench.

[mcguire]

https://images.app.goo.gl/kYh4i5pcJupVpacR8

Gold scams have been around for a significant number of decades. Bitcoin has been hyped to death for its entire existence, in spite of the "properties" it shares with gold.

Note: I own neither.

[tmpz22]

Thousands of years of cultural significance enables gold to be assigned more value then it otherwise would have.

[timmytokyo]

Exactly. There are plenty of other precious metals that could have been used for the same purposes as gold (e.g., platinum, palladium, iridium). But they aren't. For various historical reasons.

[sulcate]

But elements are not interchangable and have important differences in properties, difficulties in refining, and workability.

Gold is tremendously useful for many applications and I believe all that you mentioned are brittle in comparison. I believe it's also rarer than a few on that list.

Mainly, I've heard a few people in my life contend that we only arbitrarily decided that gold has a use, or that it's mostly hype. I don't think that's the full case. It's workable, useful, biocompatible, profitability extractable, and obviously stunningly pretty. Not so much just culturally significant just on a whim or something, it's useful.

[lexapro]

But this could also happen to Bitcoin and crypto bros would certainly argue it has already started to happen.

[rowanG077]

It doesn't share the most important property: intrinisic worth.