Hacker News Reader

Comment by hans1729 | Hacker News Reader

Scenario: a country-wide blackout occurs. You're haggling with local farmers for food. Which has value to them, bits on a hard drive or solid gold?

View on HN

Counter scenario: you're fleeing a country ahead of war, and you know that metal detectors will be involved and your gold will be taken. But they will not be checking every piece of paper you have, everyone is in a hurry. The bank run already happened and reinsurance depends on the capital staying functional.

Bitcoin wins.

See, we can do this all day. There are points of comparison and points of departure.

I agree with your point, but consider the following:

1: Cryptocurrencies can still operate over distributed mesh networks or sneaker-nets in a semi-doomsday scenario.

2: With gold, it is difficult to verify its authenticity vs some impostor alloy without the necessary tech/knowledge.

Edit: the bottom line is that in a doomsday scenario, people have little use for bitcoins or shiny yellow rocks.

You can verify gold with a vessel of water, an already verified piece of gold and a set of scales. It's taught in story form to primary age children with the famous quote "Eureka I found it!"

Interesting point. I don't have any comment, but it looks like this guy disagrees with you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31933490

For daily transactions at the current gold price, it would be extremely hard to do this sort of measurement that way with any precision without very specialized equipment. A gram of gold (around $60) is a reasonable daily transaction size and has a volume of 0.05ml. In order to distinguish metals of similar densities, you'd have to be able to measure just a fraction of that volume accurately. Maybe there is some clever system to scale this down, but wasn't obvious to me.

Well one historic way of doing this, was instead of trading directly in minute quantities of gold, people would store larger amounts of gold in a bank and trade contracts that represent certain fractions of what is stored. This was called "currency".

We have never seen a distributed mesh network that worked correctly in the real world at scale. The OLPC project tried doing that but ran into severe technical problems. So it's not necessarily impossible, but I simply don't believe we will have an operating mesh network in that scenario.

https://wiki.laptop.org/go/Mesh_Network_Details

If the farmer is unwilling, you'll find someone else. That was one of the conditions right? That you'll be able to find someone "who is willing to exchange it for something else with material value in any city on the planet". Not the likelihood of a farmer during a country-wide blackout. This is just moving the goalposts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com