| > Because gold is physical it is not easy to transport, and can more easily be seized by the government For most people, the more immediate threat is not the government seizing it, but robbers and/or scammers. Defending against robbers isn't that hard, especially if you have so much money to park somewhere; but more importantly, it's well-understood. OTOH the average level of technical literacy makes malware and scammers much more dangerous, and Bitcoin is far more exposed to both. The usual retort is, "just learn how to secure it properly, it's as easy as this 20-point list". When it comes to mass adoption, this is kinda like pitching Vim + LaTeX to Word users. It doesn't matter that you can secure Bitcoin better than gold, if you know what you're doing, because most people do not and will not. > It is also worse because its supply growth rate is higher, which means that if you hold gold you are losing more value every year (absent changes in demand) than if you hold Bitcoin. You can't realistically assume "absent changes in demand" IRL, making this point completely moot. On top of that, scarcity is not the determinant of value in and of itself. It's easy to make tokens of which there's a limited supply, but it's much harder to convince everyone else that they're worth using. But, for gold, that part is already done, and this consensus has been stable for literally millennia. Bitcoin is still in a consensus-building stage, and it's not even clear whether it'll ever be achieved at all, much less how long it'll take. > If BTC gains mass adoption, then it will be the best store of value that we have. So, BTC should be mass-adopted because it is the best store of value, but it can only be the best store of value if it's mass-adopted? BTW, I should be clear that I'm not anti-Bitcoin or anti-crypto in general - I just think that speculating on it is neither productive nor safe. Unfortunately, that's also 99% of all the economic activity in the ecosystem right now. Hopefully that bubble will burst eventually, and it'll go back to its crypto-anarchist roots. |