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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

Is gold the ultimate greater fool? Sure, it might have "intrinsic value" (eg. industrial use), but the current and historical price far exceeds that of comparable substances. Only about 7.5% of gold mined goes to industrial use, with the rest going to jewelry (48.5%), investment (29.2%), and central banks (14.8%). https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-in...

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If your numbers are accurate >=55% of the demand for Gold is completely organic and because of the desire of human beings to wear it. The rest is largely as a hedge against other assets under the belief that the demand for Gold will endure a crisis. This sounds healthy.

Contrast this to Bitcoin where it has already been established in other comment threads that the vast majority of Bitcoin trading volume on dozens of exchanges might be fake ( see Bitwise/SEC presentation) and that a huge amount of volume is via the BTC/USDT pair and USDT may be fraudulent. Sounds pretty unhealthy.

> Contrast this to Bitcoin where it has already been established in other comment threads that the vast majority of Bitcoin trading volume on dozens of exchanges might be fake ( see Bitwise/SEC presentation) and that a huge amount of volume is via the BTC/USDT pair and USDT may be fraudulent. Sounds pretty unhealthy.

You do realize that most gold and silver traded on the COMEX is also "fake" in the sense that they're trading in amounts of underlying gold and silver that could never ever be delivered at the COMEX prices?

JP Morgan even got a tiny "still worth it" fine for blatant metals price manipulation: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/jpmorgan-to-pay-%24920-mln-f...

Note that the fine for JP Morgan was so tiny compared to profits made that there's 0 incentive for them !and others! to stop this behavior. Sounds pretty unhealthy.

All in all, I don't really see how "fake volume" on some exchanges would make Bitcoin any less valuable as an alternative to holding USD or other fiat?

> You do realize that most gold and silver traded on the COMEX is also "fake" in the sense that they're trading in amounts of underlying gold and silver that could never ever be delivered at the COMEX prices?

Which means that gold is UNDERVALUED - there's a lot more demand for it than can be fulfilled with physical metal, hence the "paper gold" in form of contracts. If the COMEX scam comes to an end we can see gold price skyrocketing to 20-30k USD per ounce.

People often choose gold jewelry because of its value as a metal. Either because they want to be able to cash it in one day (a traditional form of family savings for some communities) or because an expensive gift is preferred to a cheap one, even if the cheap one had all the same physical properties.

>If your numbers are accurate >=55% of the demand for Gold is completely organic and because of the desire of human beings to wear it.

It's not as simple as that. If people wanted gold jewelry for the appearance the pieces would be gold plated.

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