[angry_albatross]

One nice thing about gold is that we don't have to keep paying money for gold to continue to exist. It will sit on a shelf and not charge us any money for sitting there. Bitcoin exists on a network of computers that need electricity to run. If we stopped paying for this network to run, the bitcoin would stop existing, since the ownership of bitcoin really is solely determined by the ownership records on this computer network.

That is my argument, that Bitcoin cannot maintain its value long term because the value is leaking out of the system in the form of electricity bills. Furthermore, we cannot let these bills become too small, or else the network becomes vulnerable to a 51% attack, so as a society we collectively must pay a large amount of "rent" on this store of value, which causes the value in this value pool to slowly deflate over time.

We have been overcoming this drain so far by "investors" continuing to pour money into the system, but those investors cannot possibly get all of their money back, because it's been spent on electricity.

[bottlepalm]

By your own argument gold is expensive - expensive to secure, expensive to transport, slow to transport (time is money), expensive to verify. So yes it does cost money to hold and transact gold. So your same 'leaky' argument applies. Maintaining any store of value or currency is never free, but the benefits far outweigh the costs as now we have an inflation resistant medium on which to trade goods and services with.

[angry_albatross]

Well I'm not trying to argue for gold being a good store of value either, it might not be. But another reason why I would prefer to have gold is that people make use of gold to make jewelry and electronics, so that creates a demand that helps to prop up its value.

The point I was making is that in a passive state, just sitting on a shelf, I believe that the cost of maintaining ownership of all the gold in the world is orders of magnitude lower than the cost of maintaining the entire bitcoin network, and I think that must continue to be the case due to the threat of 51% attacks. (If the cost of running the bitcoin network drops below a certain threshold, it becomes profitable for a rogue actor to rent a large amount of compute power and force in some fraudulent transactions.) So I believe that the "leaky bucket" effect is stronger with bitcoin than it is with gold, and there isn't a similar real world use case of bitcoin similar to the manufacturing of jewelry like there is for gold to counteract this leak.

Therefore, the total value held by all of the holders of bitcoin must be declining due to this leak, which counteracts the idea that it is inflation resistant in the long term.

[bottlepalm]

Your passive analogy doesn't work because Gold needs to be secured and defended, which requires energy or other people are going to steal it.

Just like Bitcoin needs to be secured and defended with compute for at least new transactions. A 51% attack will allow you block new transactions or double spend coins you have, not spend or steal other people's coins on the ledger because you don't have the private keys for those.

[angry_albatross]

Yes, and I believe that the total energy needed to secure and defend all the gold in the world is still much lower than the total energy needed to run the entire bitcoin network. I don't feel motivated to do a back of the envelope calculation to justify that claim though, so maybe we disagree on that point. Still, there is the material usage argument for gold that helps it maintain its value that bitcoin does not have going for it.

Even if a 51% attack only allows the attacker to double spend, that is stealing someone's coins, namely the coins of the party that you reversed the transaction on the first time you spent the coins. In addition, once people realized that double spends were occurring and were possible, it would cause a loss of confidence in the coin, causing a loss of perceived value, which then lowers the sale price (i.e. the "actual" value), meaning that the coin would not serving as a very good inflation resistant store of value.

[bottlepalm]

Yep computing the energy comparison we’re not going to figure out here, but if you’re right then it would mean that it would require less energy to attack Fort Knox and take their gold. If not that means Bitcoin requires less energy. So which is it?

I’m going to store my value in the thing that’s harder to crack (which must mean it will require more energy, will it not?)

[angry_albatross]

I didn't say anything about the amount of energy required to steal gold from anyone. I was talking about the energy required to maintain the ownership of the gold. These are two completely different things. If I bury a box of gold in the woods, I can then spend zero energy to keep that box exactly where it is, but a thief might have to spend a lot of energy to dig many holes in the forest ground since they don't know where I buried it. Or, more likely, they don't know who I am or that I own any gold, and the energy required to steal the gold from me is kind of infinite since they have no idea where to start, and would be required to do some sort of brute force search of the entire planet.

The point I was making is that I believe that the bitcoin value storage system burns more energy in a "passive" state, just keeping all the coins safe than the gold storage system, where security by obscurity is doing a lot of the work. As far as whether it takes more energy to mount a 51% attack on the bitcoin network or to rob Fort Knox, I don't know. That is a different and irrelevant question. I'm sure that the energy spent on the guards and A/C and everything for the building containing gold at Fort Knox must be far less than the energy usage of bitcoin, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it is easier to steal from Fort Knox and get away with it.