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Comment by defterGoose | Hacker News Reader

I'm truly struggling to understand how gold can be censored.

Also, left out of this discussion is the fact that gold is actually tangible, divorced from some weird semantic backflips. You can build useful things with it.

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Holding Bitcoin is not a semantic backflip. Do you hold the dollars in your bank account?

Also: gold can easily be confiscated and it has been before - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102.

How much gold do you think you can travel with? Think the TSA would allow even $100k of gold to be carried on your person?

Given golds limited supply, why has the price been relatively stable in dollars (which are unlimited)? Because the gold market can easily be manipulated because central banks and Govs hold most of the supply and they can, and do, suppress with targeted market supply flooding.

> Do you hold the dollars in your bank account?

No, we don't, which is exactly why gold is considered superior.

You missed the point.

Holders of gold maintain custody at risk of physical confiscation.

Holders of Bitcoin maintain custody (of the password that allows spending said Bitcoin) and are cannot he compelled one way or another. The bitcoin moves when they say so.

I didn't miss the point; this discussion is conflating two separate ideas of ownership: physical ownership of an item (gold, dollars in-hand), and unrestricted (unrestrictable?) use of an item (bitcoin, and to a limited extent dollars in-hand and gold).

There's four things in play in this discussion, and they each fit those ideas differently. Paper dollars in the hand, digital dollars in a wallet, gold in the hand, and bitcoin. This discussion would be over if better definitions of 'ownership' were used.

Yes, you can fly with far more than $100k in gold, iirc coin dealers do so on the way to conventions. They typically ask for a private screening.

Would you dare try that with dark skin and/or a Latin American accent?

> You can build useful things with it.

A vanishingly small percent of gold's value is attributable to its industrial use. Of all the gold ever mined in history, only something like 1% has been used in an industrial or construction context.

Maybe if you extend "useful things" to jewelry you might have a point. But almost assuredly jewelry is made out of gold because gold is expensive and valuable. Not the other way around.

If everyone on Earth tomorrow forgot about gold's historical role as a store of value, it might be worth $50 an ounce at most.

Well, ok, but my point still stands. Even if the only reason gold has such high value is that everyone agrees it has value then it's the same as Bitcoin, but again, at the end of the day, it is physically useful and therefore less volatile.

You might find this long-form article attempting to make an argument against “bitcoin has no intrinsic value” skepticism:

https://medium.com/coinmonks/bitcoin-has-no-intrinsic-value-...

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