The mining of Bitcoin uses as much resources as people are willing to pay for the resulting coins.
The same holds true for gold.
3000 tons of gold are mined per year. Which is worth about $150B. So the mining probably uses resources of about $150B as well.
The value of bitcoins mined per year is $15B.
So Gold mining probably uses about 10x as much resources as Bitcoin mining.
Bitcoin requires a constant supply of electricity to maintain its utility. Without electricity, Bitcoin would collapse.
Gold’s utility as a medium of exchange and a store of value is secure in a crisis, bitcoin’s is not.
The exchange of Bitcoin costs just as much as people are willing to pay for it. That amount can go arbitrarily low.
This is simply untrue. We're not talking about simply moving your wallet on a pendrive.
In this context moving bitcoin means changing ownership and this simply cannot happen without electricity.
I'm curious about this: What portion of the electricity used for mining is needed to prevent the collapse of bitcoin? My understanding is that the answer looks something like "however much is required to make a 51% attack impractical." If that's right, how should we go about estimating it? Should we understand "practical" to mean "profitable", or should we be thinking more about unprofitable, terroristical attacks?
We'll talk again in 5 years time.
Also, gold is the one most manipulated market in the world, having both banks, central banks and governments actively interfering in its price discovery.
It is incredibly clear. Millions of kWhs go in, hashes are computed, a couple of bits of information are stored. Nevertheless BTC holders go to extraordinary lengths to justify the status quo.
Bitcoin gets exactly the treatment it deserves.
50% of gold is used as an asset to store value. This half is just a more cumbersome store of value than Bitcoin. It costs more money to store and move gold than to store and move Bitcoin.
That might not be true if you consider that it is dramatically easier to lose $1b of bitcoin by forgetting the key, but there is almost no way you could lose $1b of gold by forgetting the combination or losing the key to the safe.
And if you stored bitcoin for 20 years on a key without moving it, would you really be that confident that after 20years you would still have access to it? That the media you used to store the key on didn’t degrade? That you have the correct password. I can be extremely certain that the gold bars I have now will be exchangeable in the future.
With bitcoin when storing money, there is a much bigger risk of it going to zero when you are storing it.
You mention keeping gold in a safe. The first question to assess the safety of that gold would be where that safe is.
Bitcoin doesn't "move fast and break things"... it just keeps chugging along every 10 minutes adding new blocks and ignoring the naysayers crying about the energy usage.
If they were really concerned, they would stop taking flights across the country to talk about their useless startup at a conference nobody wants to be at.
Instead they try to police the world's energy, and don't realize Bitcoin will drive unsubsidized renewable energy faster than any government program.