Astonishingly, crypto even less defensible.
Large corporations don't usually light money on fire for no reason.
I'm talking about industrial usage - like the contacts on your CPU. Gold offers a unique combination of very high electrical conductivity and near-immunity to corrosion.
Industrial use has gone down. They have started using other metals. As an example, the Pentium Pro used significantly more gold than modern CPUs do.
If true, gold's value has not risen, the currency's value it is being measured with has gone down.
Bitcoin is beautiful to maybe a few hundred people.
> Animal manures are a valuable source of nutrients for crop growth. But, since every farm operation is different, each manure will have unique characteristics. Make regular laboratory manure analysis an important step in your manure and nutrient management planning. Understand that the total nutrient content in manure is not available the first year and that some nutrients may be lost depending on management practices.
https://extension.umn.edu/manure-land-application/manure-cha...
never mind, I see others have already proceeded to do that.
The beauty line doesnt work, because then platinum shouldnt have any serious value despite its rarity (it just looks like silver basically)
The industrial value is laughable, but read comments below/above to debate that more at length.
The scarcity line doesn't work, because you have elements like bismuth which are also (Arguably) more beautiful than gold https://66.media.tumblr.com/61ce390242a79a767772d4b2027eb902... but command prices far less despite being .025 vs .0031 on the PPM abundance on earth. Or even look at ruthenium which has a similar look to platinum and is even rarer than gold. Did I mention it also goes for about 400 an ounce? Quite a savings over gold.
The only thing that makes sense is that we as a collective have decided gold has value of X.
It isn't. You just don't seem to understand how it works.
thats true for anything. that includes currencies, what you get paid, the value of a hockey card, the value of a car, the value of a banana, etc. sure, if society doesn't want to pay you anything for 'it', you can do with it what you want, like eat the banana (before it becomes worthless to anyone).
I am not a gold bug, i personally dont think its a great investment. its not a hedge against a declining market, and its difficult to own in large quantities. however; statements like 'its only valued because people give it value' are not very informative. everything is valued that way. everything.
also, the industrial value of gold is not laughable. its negligible because we have plenty of gold to meet industrial needs. but its not laughable, its in your smart phone, its in your desktop / laptop, etc.
Currencies have value because entities with monopolies on force (countries) give them special legal status to be used conveniently as means of exchange. This is one of the hurdles for Bitcoin, and was a big source of debate in 2016-2018. Every time you spend Bitcoin you have to keep track of the avg. acquisition cost and resulting realized capital gains for every transaction to be able to declare the appropriate gains or losses on your taxes at year-end. A heavy burden for a "currency".
> statements like 'its only valued because people give it value' are not very informative
If you go to first principles, sure, everything is an illusion. But gold, crypto, and other "stores of value" derive their value in fundamentally different ways than everything else. Our existing models and body of knowledge do not apply to them. This is worth investigating. All other things are consumed in some way or another, and the rate at which they are consumed, relative to their supply, determines their price. The consumption of gold relative to its supply is much too low to justify its price using the same models.
Things like cars and bananas are useful outside of being a medium of exchange. You can use a car to get around, and you can eat a banana if you are hungry.
Dollar bills and Gold are useful as long as society agree that you can exchange them for cars and bananas. When society stops agreeing that currency is worth anything (i.e. hyperinflation), money becomes worthless and people throw it away or burn it.
Typically, printing excess currency is what causes it to lose value. Gold avoids that because you cannot just "print" it - you have to physically mine it from the earth by exerting effort.
Bismuth's attractiveness is subjective, but what is not subjective is that it's found in ore in mineral form, not in pure form like gold. It's also brittle, and not easily worked to jewelry by primitive methods like gold.
Anyway, agree that gold is largely assigned it's value based on social reasons. Also would say that, in spite of its many faults, it's a much, much better investment than cryptocurrencies.
I'm not going to argue that, on the basis that crypto is super volatile and has potential to outperfrom etc etc. Gold is a far safer store of value, a much better hedge against market turmoil, and generally easier to "own" at low risk of having it nabbed.
- divisible (including literally soft to divide)
- fungible
- identifiable
- verifiable
- scarcity tested (people have been looking for, and trying to create, gold for so long without success that supply estimates can be trusted)
And the big one: branding.
Money is only useful when everyone uses it. It has one of the most powerful network effect of any system. The fact that it was successfully used as money for thousands of years, and everyone knows it, making it the default non-fiat money in terms of mind-share - has enormous value. Are you really going to try to convince everyone to exchange bismuth instead when fiat collapses?
I've thought about one from a conceptual standpoint. In finance, many buy-side firms are collecting the same alternative data. This might be anything from consumer reviews to executive flight traffic data. So, could the buyside band together to create "Bloomberg"?
More buyside firms now have data science teams, and with the explosion of alternative data, you could make the argument that the DIY is too taxing for one firm and the vendor is too slow at incorporating new datasets, and merely is the middleman. I don't think a hedge fund would give away its secret sauce, but much of this data eventually becomes table stakes.
I've thought about whether a token could be created to provide an incentive for firms to build and share datasets. Tokens could be rewarded if a large number of other firms use/read from a particular dataset, or another firm could fork a dataset to clean dirty data and potentially tokens would flow to multiple firms in this instance. More firms using the network should lead to more data and a more valuable network/token.
Gold as metal has something more than what makes it scarce and valuable, something we have yet to discover. There's a good reason why all central banks of all economies(US,Chine,Russia) are holding on to gold as much as they can and buy/steal more of it as the opportunity arises.
If most people investing in gold are using it as a store of value, it says nothing of the other uses for the material.
When you're making an investment in something, it's a feature for that thing to have more, not less, potential applications.
Yeah, gold is kinda similar to bitcoin, kinda different. I don't think much of what has been said is particularly new to most people.
Granted, fiat has some major advantages: momentum, required for taxes, no capital gains tax, etc. But neither is a productive asset.
Not that paying taxes is bad. It helps keep inflation down vs the government just borrowing all the fiat it needs from the fed. However, if you try and run your whole life in gold or bitcoin or whatever you just can't do it legally.
Historically there has always been a shortage of capital, and plenty of productive enterprises competing for that capital, so investors have received a discount on expected future earnings. But I think the case can be made that in the current economy, there is no such discount. That appears to be Buffet's stance, judging from his public comments. He says that he doesn't practice market timing, but simply can't find many worthwhile investments.
That is changing with the next breed of cryptocurrencies like Stellar and EOS. Take for example https://intercoin.org (disclaimer: working on it). It is explicitly designed to solve real problems, and the applications are listed in the video.
I consider Bitcoin and Ethereum to be the myspace and friendster of the industry.
Why Intercoin looks like a scam
Why it’s ridiculous to be calling Bitcoin and Ethereum the myspace and friendster of the industry when they are literally the first movers and have been around for 10 years but painted themselves into a corner and are unable to scale - no one uses bitcoin for real world transactions and projects building a token on ethereum who needs it to be actually used regularly says they’ll get off ethereum right in their whitepaper (Kik Messenger for instance).
How can you say Intercoin (or EOS or SAFE network or Stellar) has no advantages over Bitcoin and Ethereum, what planet are you on?
We have half a million lines of public code written over 7 years. We have been trying to fix decentralization for longer than you knew about crypto. And MAidSAFE has been doing this for 12 years!
Why would “projects like this” be “burnt out of the space” in the bear market, when I just said they are the future of the space, which has stagnated?
The promise was utility tokens and ICOs, where the tokens would be presold and the network would be owned by the participants instead of extracting rents. Tht was the dream. That was chilled by regulators, in favor of security tokens.
This reaction is what’s ridiculous. Imagine me saying this about MySQL for instance, or Wordpress. It looks like a scam guys. It has no advantages over current first-gen database systems or CMS, and there can never be anything better
Do you really, honestly think that a system burning more electricity than most countries to do 7 transactions per second, where each full node needs an ever growing amount of memory to even join the network, is the best BFT database and distributed ledger that can ever exist?
Look at other projects like Holochain and Maidsafe. Look at the evolving EOS ecosystem. “People” who dislike cryptocurrency hardly know what’s going on it. “People” also disliked the Internet, the Web, social networking, and thought it was a fad. At the very least, answer my questions point by point and bring some substance. Other people are working for years on free open source software, instead of cushy jobs at some cushy VC funded startup, which is likely to fail, and you are calling THEM scammers because...?
You do realize that these projects produce open source software AND are looking to build a decentralized ecosystem where you no longer have to extract rents and have middlemen like Facebook which can be hacked, influence elections etc. And meanwhile you say once these projects are burned out and we go back to ethereum THEN finally we can get back to the business of decentralization? Ha ha ha.
If you haven't played around with EOS and are interested in blockchain computing you should check it out. Being able to write C++ code and deploy it on chain is pretty dope.