Bitcoin could never be gold even if it wanted to. Making gold proper hard currency is easy, just merge two neutron stars and you’ll have a finite amount to drill up. That’s nothing like having to compute some hash where you simply set up the rules of creation. Gold cannot be distributed or forked via github, it’s simply a fundamentally flawed comparison.
There’s people who think it’s just fine and dandy to have multiple currencies making the rounds in the economy. The problem is that it’s just a horrible user experience in the end. It reminds me of those anarchists who believe we should all govern in free assemblies and have those dull daily meetings. Aint nobody got time for that, few months and you’ll have people paying some guy to go get into arguments with some other guy and to make their decisions for them. Sounds familiar doesn’t it.
You’re not going to get farmers, clowns and housewives to check the daily fluctuations between the dozen or so cryptocs-du-jour and decide which one to invest in, hedge against or transfer to. Well, unless you spend the majority of your time thinking about that stuff and getting paid to do so. You could make a decent buck doing just that... hmmm, if only we had something resembling it.
Keep it simple, brains like simple. Don’t make me think. If you make my computer think, at least have tractable math without a gazillion variables.
We currently have one currency for most people's everyday use (local government currency), and they don't bother to read up on what the stock market is up to, but there are plenty that will and choose to buy shares in whatever they think is worth buying.
And we'll probably even have the equivalent of retirement accounts and mutual funds for cryptocurrency, we're not even that far away from that reality today.
So yeah, there are people who aren't going to want to pay attention to all that, and they won't need to whenever we've reached that tipping point. They'll just have bitcoin (or whatever) and deal exclusively in bitcoin, and they won't care what its price is compared to everything else, just like no one bothers to peg the US dollar to any particular share.
It's because fiat currency is still so dominant that bitcoin appears to be volatile in comparison, because they're using USD as the anchor. If bitcoin becomes the dominant coin, it will appear to be just as stable, if not moreso, as you won't have quantitive easing or government manipulation to worry about.
The world functioned without those things for much longer than we've had them. In the past, the only controls were whether new precious metal or other resource deposits were found.
I think the cryptocurrency approach affirmatively rejects the notion that a central bank's controls are a net positive.
The oldest forms of scripture we’ve found are mesopotamian clay tablets depicting the debts of people relative to eachother (John still needs to pay back Don for that ox he got last year). They were stored in temples and administered by the clergy... centrally.
I think a deeper question to ask is whether the monetary
controls of which you speak are designed to serve the masses
or to maintain current power and wealth distribution?
Assuming the existing network is not made obsolete, and if there is any on-going demand then later users will need to sacrifice disproportionately excessive trade into the network as the early adopters simply horde the majority of the supply.
I'd rather have transparency and one-time benefit to a select few than a permanent, secretive benefit.
The US federal reserve system works pretty well and I don't really have a huge problem with it. My point is simply that the downsides to cryptocurrencies you rightly highlight have to be viewed in context of the current alternatives.
In economics, the Gini coefficient is the standard measure
of how inequitable a society is. This is tricky to
determine for Bitcoin, as it's not quiet a "society" in
the Gini sense, one person may have multiple addresses and
many addresses have been used only once or a few times.
(The commonly-cited figure of 0.88 is based on one small
exchange in 2011.) However, a Citigroup analysis from
early 2014 notes: "47 individuals hold about 30 percent,
another 900 a further 20 percent, the next 10,000 about
25% and another million about 20%"; and distribution
"looks much like the distribution of wealth in North Korea
and makes China's and even the US' wealth distribution
look like that of a workers' paradise
Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir found in a 2012 study that only
22% of then-existing Bitcoins were in circulation at all,
there were a total of 75 active users or businesses with
any kind of volume, one (unidentified) user owned a
quarter of all Bitcoins in existence, and one large owner
was trying to hide their pile by moving it around in
thousands of smaller transactions. (Shamir is one of the
most renowned cryptographers in the world and the "S" in
"RSA encryption")"
That defeats the original purpose of bitcoin, but that could be their intention. The settlement of the currency could be decentralised but the supply of the currency could be controlled.
In my opinion that leaves many other challenges, some fundamental like the concept of public ledger, incompatible with the secrecy of banking (i.e. the payments you make is not public information).
But I do think it makes at least as much intuitive sense to say "we can make as much money as we need, and competition between currencies will limit inflation" as to say "we won't have enough money so the economy won't grow."
that innovation could mean replacing bitcoin with another currency through forceful governmental intervention of some kind. or it might mean modifying (i.e. distorting/destroying) bitcoin's current protocols or algos. bitcoin is in its early stages, but so are governmental efforts to regulate it.
And so are government efforts to compete with it. I think that eventually, the Treasury Dept. will see so much convenience in crypto currency(s), they will issue their own coin, the only 'legal' tender in the land.