Hacker News Reader

But that doesn't really work because those statements aren't all true of gold. Gold has functioned as a store of value for thousands of years. The price of gold changes over time, but it doesn't fluctuate nearly as much as bitcoin - which is a handy property for a "store of value".

Some gold obsessed people probably have hyperbolic claims about what gold can do, but my impression of it is that it is generally understood as a hedge against inflation or a store of value. Relatively few people think they are going to hodl gold until they 1,000x their way into being gold-millionaires and most of those that do probably aren't expecting real gains from gold.

Gold doesn't promise to be decentralized currency. Cryptocurrency does try to make that promise. Gold does solve problems it didn't create - e.g. use in electronics or in jewelry.

I think most of this parody just substitutes the word "Gold" for "Bitcoin" but misses that gold actually isn't making the same claims.

Clever analogy. Let me quickly give some background on actual the use of gold as a store of value, besides the obvious point that gold does not rust (decay) and that it is somewhat rare.

As you know, gold is also shiny and has been used for jewelry for thousands of years in many cultures. Some anthropologists have reversed the causality of value and jewelry, arguing that gold is precious _because_ it is used as jewelry. Indeed, in many cultures different types of jewelry [1] were used as a basis for currency (as in unit of accounting).

Therefore, one of the most basic human features, dressing up within a social hierarchy might be at the basis of gold and currency.

I don't see any such use case for cryptocurrencies (yet).

[1] besides pearls, beads, necklaces, it could also be rare make-up material or even feathers. I recommend the work of anthropologist David Graeber in his book Debt: the First 5000 years.

It’s also a useful industrial material that is almost certainly in the device you’re using to read this website.

Also from the book you’ve mentioned: gold was useful as a currency because soldiers often plundered them when raiding villages, and soldiers wanted to sell them in exchange of other things, so gold began to circulate around the regions they’ve conquered.

This is exactly right. Cryptocurrencies are digital gold. That's what makes crypto so scary. When gold was made too central a part of the monetary/financial system in the 1920s and 1930s, it caused the Great Depression and quite possibly WWII.

Deflationary tokens, if they get too enmeshed with the financial system, tend to be hoarded to a point where they displace productive investment on an economy wide scale, putting a huge gridlock in the economy.

Even Douglas Adams tried to warn us: https://benoitessiambre.com/specter.html

didn't regulation successfully shut down commerce with gold?

Why wouldn't that happen with bitcoin

You could stop it with extreme violence, but I sincerely doubt the US will start killing and jailing people for sending bitcoin.

Thus, it is here to stay.

Gold mining and the gold standard should also be banned.

May I humbly suggest replacing

> because it's full of cleverness

with

> because it's shiny

Gold is valuable because it is difficult to dig out of the ground, and it can be made into electronics. Neither is true of Bitcoin. Thus, you've built a false equivalence and are trying to equivocate.

I think it's time for us in the tech world to speak out and make it clear the emperor has no clothes here. _USD_ is sustained by a mix of money laundering, human slavery, fraud, ransom, gambling, and delusion. It has no social benefit except helping end first dates fast.

What we especially need to stress to regulators is that there's no relationship between the claims of _USD_ and our now hundreds of years of experience. It's not decentralized, it's not a good store of value, and it's not a promising piece of presidential portraiture.

_USD_ solves no problems that it didn't first create, and most of those it doesn't solve. Banks are neither of those things—at worst they're an API for fraud, or as I put it, self-funding institutional greed.

I think most of us in the industry gave USD a long leash because it's full of cleverness and seemed innovative just on those terms. But it's time we recognize that cleverness is being used as bait to defraud more people and perpetuate a con. Enough is enough.

The two things people need to know about gold are completely non-technical:

1. If it isn't backed by self-perpetuating value, it isn't worth anything outside of what people believe it is worth

2. If it works, it is only due to financial regulation

I'm not anti USD nor am I equating USD to gold or crypto. Just showing that these are mostly lazy arguments that can be applied to pretty much anything tradable on any market.