Gold has a commodity value above zero. It’s used industrially. Even if everybody decides it’s not worth its precious metal value, it’s not worthless. Bitcoin has zero intrinsic value. None.
It's not only almost 100% speculation, it doesn't have much history track record.
Crypto bros need to understand that they aren't the first people to discover a speculation market, and just because they can dream of utility doesn't mean they test if the world wants to treat it as a reality. What they're doing is, from a financial perspective, boring and in many cases outdated.
What’s better: someone living in a house, or a house sitting idle as a store of value?
What’s better: someone storing his wealth in houses and gold ignots, or in special financial assets that don’t take away products from other people?
It’s bad to be able to transport wealth through time? Spend it or lose it? Never work hard now for later?
And bitcoin is even _worse_ than gold, on the fundamentals; gold does have at least have that bit of intrinsic value (plus a few millennia of cultural cachet). Bitcoin has _nothing_.
I can restart forks of both bitcoin and Ethereum on my laptop at this moment. I can restart 10 forks each. Or 100.
I cannot do that with gold.
Yes, but Russian Federation uses only one to evade sanctions.
In China, it's nearly impossible to invest your assets without friends in the government. The government strictly controls conversion of their currency to non-Chinese currencies. As strange as this sounds, but with cryptocurrencies, you can export value from your country to something more stable.
Same goes for many south american countries.
I still wouldn't invest into Bitcoin or Ethereum but I live in the west where there is the rule of law and one can invest into a large variety of asset classes.
In addition to that, there are also 10.5 million altcoins (10000 new are created every day). But all of them together hold just 17% of crypto value. So you can, of course, create another millions of forks, but it won't make a dent in Bitcoin value.
No it isn't. My credit card has an intrinsic value of zero. It might even be negative due to the massive amounts of infrastructure necessary to run it, similarly to bitcoin. The value is in the networks surrounding it, not whatever method Visa uses to move the bits around, be it blockchain, databases, or whatever. And even then, Visa's value add is only a few points on the transaction. It's in no way a speculative asset and if Visa went away tomorrow forever, it would suck for maybe a month while we adjusted to using cash again. In the same vein, if bitcoin went away tomorrow, I wouldn't notice until reading a panicked article about it.
If the US dollar went away tomorrow, however, I'd be happy to have stocked up on ammunition and cured meats.
It really doesn't matter. The honest commodity value is the same price as the market value. 60+ percent of new gold mined every year goes towards jewelry and electronics. The base price of gold is high due to demand, not due to speculation. Gold is pretty and pretty hard to find - thus the price goes up.
That makes ETH is comparable to shares of a company, where fees are revenue, new issuance to stakers is cost, and any net profit is paid out to ETH holders in the form of stock buybacks. You can calculate a PE ratio.