[hypeatei]

Bitcoin mostly follows the S&P 500 now. No one actually cares about the technical merits. If they did, it'd probably be worth nothing because it's worse than our current financial system in every way: slow, irreversible transactions on a public ledger.

[scottiebarnes]

And how does it compare to gold?

[hypeatei]

Gold is a shiny, tangible thing that doesn't require electricity and it doesn't put all your transactions on a public ledger. Oh, and it lasts basically forever plus it's malleable so you can get it down to quite small denominations.

[scottiebarnes]

Ah, so gold is a shiny rock that doesn't have a decentralized transmission network (the internet).

Mining and smelting gold requires quite a bit of electricity. But Bitcoin the network undoubtedly uses more.

As for small denominations, Bitcoin goes down to a single unit of Satoshi (1/100 millionth of a btc) and since its digital, subdivision is trivial.

So despite this, there are far more retail and commercial opportunities to exchange your btc for goods and services, where as I don't know of any place I can trade gold coins for things.

[carlosjobim]

Gold is the best thing which has ever existed in the universe, mind your tongue.

[tim333]

Gold has the issue that you can mine a lot more of it. The supply of bitcoin is capped.

[yifanl]

The supply of Gold is capped too, it's just further out.