Comment by graeme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by graeme | Hacker News Reader

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When you mine gold, you get gold, and gold is nice. If we could magically make 100x the gold, that would be great! Current gold investors would be sad but it would be a win for the world.

Bitcoin mining produces heat, and maintains the bitcoin network. It doesn’t actually increase the supply of anything: the total number of bitcoins is arbitrary. The real value is whatever the network produces (happiness in its hodlers, money laundering, some future use case)

Gold’s utility is: some industrial uses, it looks pretty and has special properties, and if you had to bury some treasure for some descendants in 500 years you could reasonable figure some gold coins would probably be worth something comparable in the future, no maintenance required

That’s about it. Never been a big gold fan but those three uses seem pretty indisputable.

The people arguing for bitcoin present it as a store of value but you need a hell of a lot of costly ongoing maintenance for that. Gold would still have those uses even if all mining stopped. Without mining, bitcoin is defunct, conversely.

Edit: oh yeah, I suppose gold lets you keep some value anonymously and take it with you across borders. I think Bitcoin wins on that count but since I’m listing the uses of gold I shouldn’t omit that. There may be others I’m forgetting

Edit: Yes, you're also forgetting how cumbersome it is to transport gold, how to verify that it's real, how we live in a digital era and yet we're still being bogged down by a physical artifact to store/transport value and how if we'd have a futuristic mindset we would want something immaterial that may be future proof.

Also about the 500years thing, no i wouldn't actually trust that. Sorry to burst the bubble but gold hasn't been here that long in our hands compared to humans, and before gold we used other store of values or currencies. Many other civilizations held their value in their (then rare) tokens (see shell money, see Rai stones, (...), and all of them eventually lost all their value.

In this day and age, in 500 years i would be extremely surprised if humans, or super-humans, or human-AI hybrid, whatever, hadn't figure out how to make gold like we make a sandwich for breakfast. Gold (if still useful, and other much better materials haven't been developed by then) will be as common as Rai stones became when some cunning explorers decided to use their higher technology to transport them and make them total valueless to the tribes that used them to store value.

Gold will see it's "store of value" fate fade in not too long. It's just a matter of when. And don't get me wrong, BTC might too. I also can't imagine that in 500 years the encryption we have today won't be child's play for the future hyper-computers. But anyway, my point is that gold is nothing special in terms of store of value. We're just being bogged down right now for lack of technology, but that will come, just like it came to all the other tokens which eventually turned their value to almost 0.

> If we could magically make 100x the gold, that would be great! Current gold investors would be sad but it would be a win for the world.

I am not sure about that. If there were a magical new way of creating gold to inflate its supply, it would not be good for the world.

I can see why it wouldn't be good for people who are invested in gold, but I don't see why it wouldn't be good for the world.

Good your are specific of Bitcoin and not a non mining blockchains as Ethereum.

Ethereum still has mining. But yes I do draw a distinction. I can at least conceive of how Ethereum might become super useful.

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