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Comment by johnwheeler | Hacker News Reader

Section 1 is so strange I'm at a loss for words.

"...in the style of the massive wall of water resembling a menacing prolongation of Mount Fuji as depicted in The Great Wave off Kanagawa"

the fuck?

Section 2 defends BTC from being a Ponzi scheme. The public doesn't worry it's a Ponzi scheme so much as an instance of Tulip Mania.

Section 3 says that since Bitcoin is prone to getting ripped off, it needs to be insured. The SEC would of course argue that since it's prone to getting ripped off, it SHOULDN'T be insured.

Section 4 is just horse shit no one at the SEC is going to understand, let alone read. FUD.

Section 5 is a basic conclusion.

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Sounds a lot like gold, then, $43/gram for elemental nothing. OK, it's something, but not nearly justifing its price relative to other metals, except the shared delusion that underlies all currency.

You're right. They're both speculative in nature. I'd argue against gold as an investment for that reason. Think I'm crazy? Get educated.

Compare gold to the DJIA since 1900.

http://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-y...

http://www.macrotrends.net/1319/dow-jones-100-year-historica...

And don't go comparing Bitcoin to gold in any event. It doesn't have the history behind it, and there are too many instances of investment fads that die hard.

Incidentally, the value that grew, and that you would have extracted in dividends, is not reflected in the share price. Also, the DJIA is weighted by the share price rather than the market capitalization of each component. (Really, it is that absurd as an index!)

Anyway I agree with your point that while the economy has surged over the past 116 years, gold has been tradeable for an ever-decreasing share of economic output or share of the available real assets, and has been far outpaced by how a conservative portfolio of equities would have performed over the same period.

While a distinction can be drawn between real economy and money or financial economy, currencies, like the US dollar, are defined as legal tender by the governments that are backed up by significant real economies.

Official currencies can be devalued relative to real economic production, either intentionally or through mismanagement, but they are not an act of faith like betting on precious metals that have long since been deprecated as official currency.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Wave_off_Kanagawa

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