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Comment by bugzz | Hacker News Reader

> By that definition, gold too is a ponzi. No, gold clearly fails to satisfy that definition on two counts.

> First, few if any gold investors have expectations of profits. They generally invest in gold as a hedge -- a "store of value" -- that they hope will retain its value in case other assets go sour.

I believe Bitcoin has potential to become the "new" gold. It's better in many ways. Does that mean I can only buy Bitcoin if I want to use it as a hedge? No! I can buy it with the expectation of profit because I expect it to be commonly used as a hedge in the future, at which time it will have a much higher price and I'll have made money.

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There are many cryptocurrencies who are nearly identical to Bitcoin, except that most don't have the widespread fame and support. In 2019 alone, 90,000 new crypto-currencies were created. Yes, there will only be 21 million bitcoins, but there are already countless, nearly an infite amount of copycat coins.

This is not the case with gold.

Comparing all those ERC20 tokens to Bitcoin is like comparing a Wix website to Google / Facebook

How about non ERC20 token? So a WIX website isn't as legitimate as Google/FB? Who is this arbiter of legitimacy?

The users, it’s the same network effect that prevents me from making a Facebook clone and taking market share.

Is this a joke? Show me a Wix website with the features and scalability of the giants.

There are plenty of other metals or “creations” like time pieces.

There is silver, and platinum, and tungsten, etc. etc. It’s the same thing just in a physical format.

There are an infinite supply of magical numbers. There are a limited supply of precious and rare metals easily minable on earth.

E.g. The price of copper has been going up over the past century (adjusted for inflation)

If you want to mine more magic numbers just add another digit to the search space and you'll easily have another 10 times more numbers.

But most coins have a limit . Btc is 21 million it's not infinite

Wait, that's fungible right?

* BTC forks (how many have there been, cause I forget.)

* If the BTC community wanted it to change, they could.

* The 100 other cryptocurrencies created every day.

There are good reasons why gold and silver became the main medium of exchange for thousands of years. Most other metals failed imported criteria to make them as useful for this purpose.

Just like Bitcoin. Your bias/ignorance is keeping you from understanding that all these things apply to BTC. I highly suggest taking a step back and reflecting on this more objectively.

> This is not the case with gold.

Silver, platinum, palladium, rhodium, copper...

Just as people have generally centered around gold, people have so far generally centered on Bitcoin. There's a great deal of other metals and a great deal of other cryptocurrencies, but if nobody really cares about them, then they are not relevant to the conversation.

Gold has actual use. At minimum, gold is worth the value of it's conductivity properties, or of it's high malleability, high density, low reactivity and low toxicity, or it's pretty looks. Bitcoin has none of those going for it except maybe the looks (to anyone who has a copy of the "pretty" Blockchain)

> palladium, rhodium

Sidenote: Both of them have surpassed gold in terms of pricing for a while recently. Not every cryptocurrency is valuable, but some can be if they can fill a gap like palladium and rhodium, that were mostly useless metals 100 years ago.

You can't make new rare elements out of thin air though.

If you had enough energy and the right equipment/process you could "alchemize" gold or any other element out of Oxygen/Carbon/Nitrogen.

Sure you can. Create a new chemical and call it a "rare substance". It will probably get about as little traction as the long tail of 99% of the cryptocurrencies out there.

Much like Bitcoin gold has virtually no uses (outside of being worth money)

I can exchange dollars for either other dollars or gold. Neither of which necessarily need the goodness (or greed) of society to constantly care and feed it.

Banks existed long before the internet did, and in a post-apocalyptic crunch we could always go back.

In post-apocalyptic crunch we are likely to go back to food, water and ammo. You and I will likely be long dead before society reverts to something like gold, so I doubt gold as post-apocalyptic hedge.

gold has no value to typical people. i can’t walk into a store and buy with gold. i can’t use gold for any purpose in day to day life. it’s an asset

> gold has no value to typical people.

The whole point of an economy is that something has value if it's valuable to someone, not just the person who's holding it.

I'm not going to use a chunk of gold for anything, but it has intrinsic uses that aren't tied to being an exchange of value. It can be used to make jewelry, electronics, food, and medical devices. In some of those applications, there is no substitute for gold.

Contrast that with Bitcoin, whose only value is speculative (whether people think it will increase in price). It has literally no other use or value. If the internet crashed, you couldn't sell your Bitcoin to someone to make jewelry out of it.

Bitcoin is already valuable to someone, maybe not you, but someone (in fact, quite a lot of people). Many of the people that consider that Bitcoin has value don't care about gold at all, some do, some don't. By the way, these same people that don't care about gold also could give a shit less that gold can be made into jewelry (or anything else). Like you said, something has value because it's valuable to someone. I think what people need to accept is that Bitcoin, right now, is valuable to a lot of people. If the internet crashed, there's going to be much bigger problems, including accessing and transferring fiat currency. What people like about Bitcoin is that you can't print more of it without forking it, or creating your own new crypto with different rules (in contrast to potentially infinite printing and borrowing of USD). To create a viable alternative to Bitcoin (via fork or otherwise), you have to market and create the same level of trust, and convince everyone who trusts Bitcoin now to switch over.

bitcoin has the same utility as paper money. that doesn’t mean it has no value

This is arguably the same for a majority of crypto users.

I see crypto as a "digital asset". It's something you store funds in to hedge markets or get around transactional issues (either because you're doing something potentially illegal by some entities definition or because your currency is shot to shit), which basically makes it like golds or precious gems.

I'm not totally sold it'll last long term, but I don't see the comparison as a huge logic leap.

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