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Comment by m3kw9 | Hacker News Reader

So let me get this straight. Gold can be compared to bitcoins in terms of scarcity and and store of value. But bitcoin itself is in practical term a proof of concept technology that is only useful when applied properly in another block chain. While gold actually has great uses. Can i say if you are investing in bitcoin, you are basically investing in equivalent a scarce physical paper with not a whole lot of use?

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Comparing gold with Bitcoin is weird. People invest in gold because its values is very stable, obviously Bitcoin's isn't :-)

Gold is highly volatile.

Volatility only exists in comparison.

BTC and Gold in one graph: http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/59975b50f1a85079738...

I'd say in this comparison gold is the stable option.

No, it doesn't. Volatility is defined in terms of an asset's past prices, not in terms of other assets.

Ok. I stand corrected. But what I meant to say is, that labeling something as "very volatile" only works in comparison.

I hear this "no real use" a lot, but I don't think it's valid. You can put 90% of your money in bitcoin and 10% in stocks. Then you have a hybrid investment where 10% of it has real use, and the other 90% is fun investment money with almost the same returns as being 100% bitcoin. Just like with gold, if Fort Knox/etc. were all sold off and used to make computer parts and jewelry, the value of gold would collapse to some fraction of what it is now.

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