Alternative is that the price would drop far below $50k, mines would shut down and people would just trade gold that is already available on the market.
Just because something is expensive to produce doesn’t mean that it’s worth that much.
Just because something is expensive to produce doesn’t mean that it’s worth that much.
Well ... it kinda does? If a commodity cannot be produced for less than $X, then the price of that commodity is not going to be that far below $X. The price can vary away to anywhere you like to signal for producers to open and close in the short term, but the equilibrium price point is ~= cost of production and the market will trend in that direction.
I'm going off one article [0] but there is enough gold to make a 28m x 28m x 28m cube. That isn't a lot of gold when compared to the 8 billion humans in the world and the amount of metal we go through (of iron, aluminium, copper, etc). Unless something really novel happens in the mining space, the price is never going to be low enough that an ordinary person can have a big block of gold. It will stabilise on the cost to mine pretty quickly.
There are other metals that are just as good as gold (like platinum) that get less press but are similarly priced.
[0] https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-much-gold-has-been-found-world
This sparks an interesting thought (for me) - gold mining (and really, any mining) is intertwined in modern times; copper mining produces gold as a by-product for example. We derive palladium and platinum from refining for other metals, we get sand for concrete from gold mining, etc. Point being, the mining industry is interwoven as to what is extracted for refinement, the by-products of that refinement (and the environmental destruction :() which of course is all economically intertwined. A mine probably won't shut down, it would probably shift to another focus?
But Bitcoin is mined for one thing (itself) and produces environmental waste (heat, etc.) with no by-products (another coin?) and no other mining (Monero?) produces Bitcoin as a by-product. So it makes me think that while it sounds good on paper to compare Bitcoin to Gold, it really doesn't work like that in real life.