Twenty-four days is not enough time to extrapolate any real meaning. It could be just chance, it could be indicative of a long-term trend, but I'd file this headline under the category of "questions to which the answer is no".
Which is more 'stable'?
A commodity on which economies have rested for millennia along with many other established uses, or a commodity less than a decade old that has yet to establish any sustainable use?
hmmm..
Nothing will ever change the fact that Bitcoin was first, it has first-mover advantage over other implementations. You could also argue it currently has the most investment, both in monitory terms and development effort.
It could be just as easily argued, probably more persuasively, that bitcoin's first mover status is more of a negative to its future prospects than a positive. This owing in large part to the hugely concentrated nature of the bitcoin currency.
It's hard to see how a bitcoin economy gets off the ground in any meaningful sense when the distribution is arranged like that. It's unlikely to get any enthusiastic buy in when people doing so understand that the value of their currency would be subject to the whims of just a few major players in the bitcoin game.
And any rich person capable of make a large bitcoin buy in would be hesitant to do so because their essentially making themselves relatively poorer than the bitcoin barons in doing so.
Figuring out a distribution model that works in concert with a growing digital economy is an open question in crypto currencies.
Yahoo and Altavisa were first-movers in search engines. Google was developed years later, they have no chance. Wait a sec...
Geocities, Homestead, and Xanga and MySpace were first-movers in web user-generated content and social networking. Facebook has no chance. Wait a sec...
Intershop has first-mover advantage in online retailing. There's no chance that Ebay and Amazon will beat them out. Wait a sec...
Pebble Watch has first-mover advantage in Smartwatches. There's no way anyone else can move them.
Commodore C64 has first-mover advantage in the consumer personal computer market. Ehhh... scratch that. The true first mover was IBM, who branded the PC and created the ATX system and all of those standards. There's no way that IBM will lose their first-mover advantage to Dell and HP.
Huh... Atari for first-mover in TV Video Game consoles? Nintendo can't beat them. Erm... I mean Sega can't beat Nintendo. I mean... Sony can't beat the Saturn or N64. I mean... Microsoft's XBox is entering an established field, they can't beat the PS2 or Gamecube.
I have no financial interest in gold, I just try to understand the world through unbiased eyes. Yes gold has a long history of use as a currency for very logical reasons(it's resistance to corrosion and elemental scarcity among them,) it also has a long list of other uses both ancient and modern.
It's 'artificial' value as a currency is not in any meaningful way different than the 'artificial' value assigned to any other object of limited supply of which people are desirous be that a concert ticket, a Picasso painting, or a bitcoin.
Unlike a concert ticket, a Picasso painting, or a bitcoin, gold can also be used to coat a space helmet, make an electronic circuit, make jewelry, coat an object in gold leaf, etc.
To think these other uses play no role in the market value of gold is naive. But even if these other uses didn't exist, and gold was still valued at the price it is now, good luck arguing against the emergent consensus of a market.
> Gold gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or some place, Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head.
http://www.aaii.com/files/images/articles/9298-figure-1.jpg
> gold can also be used to coat a space helmet, make an electronic circuit, make jewelry, coat an object in gold leaf, etc.
If you're actually interested in a hedge against inflation, go buy Wheat and Oil. When hyperinflation hit the German Economy hard in the 1930s, that's what made tons of money.
For as long as humans existed, and for as long as Humans remain on this planet, humans will need to eat. The value of Gold itself? That changes. A thousand years ago, one pound of Gold was worth one pound of salt.
http://www.smithsonianeducation.org/educators/lesson_plans/c...
I understand his point, but in a sense gold's utility is it's non-utility. Or another sense is that most people have the same understanding of it, dollars and bitcoins have no inherent utility other than people have a shared understanding of what they are, and what they are for.
Also understand that he is speaking as someone looking to allocate capital to receieve a return on that capital. There are other entities that would prefer something like gold, nation-states for example.
So Buffett is just saying if you want to see your purchasing power appreciate, don't hold your money in currencies, but invest it in value producing companies.
Salt
Yes, as your link describes, salt use to be far more scarce and therefore commanded a far higher trade value.
So it was actually that salt was far more expensive, rather than gold was cheaper.
In fact the word salary comes from a latin word pertaining to salt.
http://etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=sa...
Unfortunately extremely boring
Apologies to sillysarus.
Obviously if Bitcoin goes tits-up it will not be more stable than gold. There seems to be a non-trivial probability Bitcoin will go tits-up from shitty governance alone, but barring that it seems to me that Bitcoin has the potential to be far more stable than gold. Access to gold is dependent on a large amount of geopolitical factors that could all change at any time, as well as mineral extraction technology that is getting better all the time.
Extrapolating far enough, we'll never find an asteroid that's miraculously made almost entirely out of Bitcoin.
I'm curious as to whether your viewpoint is the same for all cryptocurrency or just Bitcoin.
we'll never find an asteroid that's miraculously
made almost entirely out of Bitcoin
There are contingency plans for if a preimage becomes possible, and I suspect they'll move to a stronger hash before it's needed.
(I'm not saying this is likely, just more likely than finding a large gold asteroid.)
It would seem much easier and reassuring to slip some gold into your pocket if you're concerned about electrical or communication networks being severed. Also the part where the vast majority of people have no idea wtf bitcoin is or how to use it wouldn't be reassuring.
I don't understand this existential battle bitcoin wants to play with gold. They can co-exist, they're fundamentally different, one is not inherently superior, they are different.
Bitcoiners just like to play this fantasy of "Oh, if only bitcoin can replace this millennia entrenched system of which it has no rational basis to do so, I'd be so rich! Yippee!"
The characteristic from which bitcoin derives it's value is a brand name. A 'bitcoin asteroid' can be found by simply copying the bitcoin source code and building a stronger brand.
Yeah, human ability to worship.
Theoretically, human ability to worship should be transferable to any object of worship.
Frankly form where i am sitting that significance has virtually shit all to do with golds chemical properties, and all to do with history.
Trade among locals were likely settled via OIUs (carrots now for mutton later or whatever). But settlement between distant peoples were harder.
One option would be by weight, with the lowest common denominator being some food grain or other. And here gold may come in, from one of those properties you mentioned, resistance to corrosion. Makes for a durable weight measurement token.
But weight depends on purity. So in comes some ruler or other that puts a brand on a measure of gold to guarantee the purity.
Over time that guarantee then becomes so reliable that people starting using the tokens directly in exchange rather than bringing out the scales.
But it is the purity guarantee that in the end make gold more than a shiny metal. And using modern material production the same guarantee could just as well be placed on a piece of plastic or similar.
But still people go gaga over gold. AKA worship.
Better go tell a large percentage of the world that they are wrong and they should all buy bitcoin then.
Fortunately even Bitcoin enthusiasts are less gung-ho about their currency then some gold-nuts like Islamic State.
Source for Islamic State: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG7YXKE4x3w
News orgs, if something is actually news and actually true, would just write "BITCOIN MORE STABLE THAN GOLD" or what have you. Any headline that ends with ? is the news org being like, "Welp, this isn't true but we still want to write about it."