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Comment by obilgic | Hacker News Reader

Then I would say gold is exactly the same. In fact, gold would be a riskier betting game as information is less transparent (estimating supply, how fast It's mined etc) compared to bitcoin.

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> gold is exactly the same

Gold is similar. It's got more history. But it's more difficult to transact with. Bitcoin appears to be this generation's (late-boomer to early-millennial) gold or trading cards or what-have-you.

Is it more difficult to transact with? I can hand you a gold coin. But with bitcoin we need the internet and a whole network of miners.

OTOH Bitcoin is easier to transact at a distance than gold.

How do you know that gold coin isn't filled with tungsten? With Bitcoin, it takes a handful of milliseconds to verify a transaction.

I guess it comes down to what we mean by easier. If we don’t count the entire mining network, developers and source code, all the maintenance and electricity costs, block chain explorers and wallet software...

Gold has a actual use as a commodity, eg in electronics and other equipment, and derives a minimum value as such. So whilst how gold is used in trading circles might have similarities to BTC, this difference IMO makes them nothing alike.

Bitcoin has a just as relevant, or more so, actual use in buying drugs and frowned upon things on the internet, escaping government restrictions on money, etc.

Gold has those same uses but at an international level and is generally approved of. The gold may never actually move, but ownership will transfer between countries.

But you have to use a middleman or intermediary. The genius of bitcoin was when Satoshi removed that and solved the double-spending problem in a decentralized way.

>Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

Except that bitcoin relies on a whole network of middlemen to prove the validity of that transaction. Without miners you have no transaction.

The quantities used are usually very small though. Gold plated not made of gold. I don't think the use as a commodity drives or explains the price.

The primary use of gold, AIUI, is jewelry in India.

There are practical limits to the supply of gold. There is no limit to the supply of crypto currency. That can be created out of thin air by anyone at any time.

> There is no limit to the supply of crypto currency

the whole point of bitcoin — whether or not you believe it has a future —is that it allows for (and has) scarcity in a digital environment in which double-spending/scarcity were previously hard to enforce without an intermediary.

there are only ever going to be 21 million bitcoin. there is a limit :)

Except it isn't. There's BTC, BCH, BSV, etc. that are all forked from bitcoin, and there is an ever-growing number of tokens started from scratch (ETH, LTC, etc.). There is an infinite supply of crypto tokens.

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