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Comment by GCA10 | Hacker News Reader

Vibes guy here. I dabbled in Bitcoin for about a year, on the notion that if the world's overall financial system got degraded, more people would view Bitcoin holdings as a safe way to preserve value. Maybe better than owning physical gold. Why not get in early before the next stampede?

But I was wrong about bitcoin > gold. It's worked the other way around. There's also persistent chatter that the supposedly uncrackable Bitcoin private keys might someday be crackable with quantum computing. Preposterous? Maybe. Maybe not. There's a mind-blowing amount of compute coming into the world, and not all of it's going to be used to create goofy memes or robo-PowerPoints. Call me timid, but I cashed out with modest Bitcoin profits last year and am fine watching the show from the sidelines from here on.

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The biggest problem with metals is the same as crypto - there's no fundamental underlying value like P/E or product announcements you can anchor the price to - so its free to fluctuate.

How much of a problem that actually is we got to find out last Friday.

A large fraction of gold mined every year is used for its material properties in industrial and electronic applications. That presents a very real floor on price. If good was suddenly worth 1/10th as much we would use it in far more industrial applications thus driving up the price. Similarly mining would slow down from the current ~3,000 tons annually again driving the price up.

Gold is currently priced way above that level, but just like the stock market were dividends allow people to buy more stock when the price is low there is a very tangible feedback loop propping up the price which eventually kicks in.

Counterintuitively this means using gold as an investment vehicle makes the world a worse place because we fall back to less efficient methods in industry, and efficiency is ultimately the engine of progress.

> A large fraction of gold mined every year is used for its material properties in industrial and electronic applications.

I thought that was less than 10%. That's a very low floor! (That said, gold is sound money)

Hence why I said at 1/10th the price we would use a lot more of it.

There’s easily decades worth of industrial use in vaults so the instantaneous floor is quite low. However feedback occurs well before you hit the actual limits here.

I read 7% of 2024 demand is industrial. Gold ended 2024 at $2600.

Recycling jewelry to make more jewelry is quite common, which kind of distorts how much the gold supply vs reserve is. If demand to manufacture jewelry ends then the supply of recycled jewelry also dries up.

~3,300 tons where mined in 2024

“Industrial and tech demand accounted for 83 tons of gold in the third quarter” of 2024. 83 * 4 = 332 so ~10% which is fairly typical.

Gold is also one of the best heat conductors so if it got really cheap it could be used a lot in industry and electronics. Anything from cookware to heat sinks!

> there's no fundamental underlying value [...] its free to fluctuate

I don't understand this argument since that's how literally all markets work: the consensus is the current price. If we're talking about fundamentals then crypto isn't comparable to gold at all since 1) it's a physical, tangible, durable thing, and 2) has been used for centuries as a store of value.

Gold is easy to understand from a human perspective and doesn't require knowledge of a blockchain or anything tech related. You store it, secure it, and transport it like any other physical asset. Whereas something like Bitcoin involves seed phrases, blockchains, irreversible transactions, a public ledger, and it's all virtual. If your store of value is one mistake away from being lost to the void then it's not very good. I'll just finish with this: there is a reason that central banks have been loading up on gold recently in light of uncertainty and not crypto.

Gold and silver, besides industrial uses, have been used both as currency and jewelry for a long time.

And why are/were they used as currency?

They’re durable, resistant to corruption, relatively rare, pretty… Titanium or gems would’ve been equally used if they were equally convenient. Not to mention that coinage could be minted or mixed with, say, copper. Gold makes good alloys and can be recovered later.

> And why are/were they used as currency?

Because there was no useful alternative and/or we didn't know better.

Currency as jewelry is a good way to secure and carry your wealth as well as display it as a status symbol (or hide it).

A ring is just a coin you wear on your finger.

> Gold and silver, besides industrial uses, have been used both as currency […]

So has credit, with documented uses earlier (Ur III, 3000BC) than gold (Lydians, 600BC).

The fundamental underlying value on stocks also depends on fluctuating prices for the goods and services that firms buy and sell, just like commodities.

Whats your baseline for volatility? 0%? Outliers aside, metals are still the most stable store of value thats widely used

And the P/E and product announcements your touting as inherent value are for generating value, not storing it. If your purpose was to store and transfer value, it would be stupid to use stocks over currency or gold

Don't even need quantum to worry: Satoshi's wallet could be a massive rug pull by the CIA/FBA/NSA when the time comes.

No one thinks the FBI is competent enough for it to be them.

The way bitcoin works is that addresses are hashes of a public key.

This technically allows for an emergency measure in case ECC is broken by a quantum computer:

The [unknown] public key becomes the private key. The signature becomes a ZKP of this key. I believe this has been proposed before as well.

The signature sizes are going to be a big problem is this scenario however, consensus may actually do something up to alleviate this in extremis. And also the people who have coins in addresses for which the public keys are known will be screwed, but then that's how everyone will know there is a problem - it's unlikely early cryptoraphically-relevant quantum computers (CRQC) will be able to front-run bitcoin transactions.

Quantum computing is interesting to think about in the context of bitcoin. It would be technically feasible to upgrade the protocol to be quantum-secure (e.g. allow wallets to make an on-chain declaration of a new PQ pubkey, and after that point all transactions must be signed with the PQ keypair) - but getting everyone to coordinate on something like that would be challenging.

Quantum computing isn't a serious threat. Would require a concentrated effort from the community to migrate to a quantum-proof hashing algorithm but there's no greater motivation than potentially losing it all.

You can easily trade gold today. You can easily trade gold if ww3 starts to the goons pressganging people into dying in the trenches so they take your bitcoin hoarding neighbor instead. You can easily trade gold after a nuclear apocalypse to your local warlord so you get access to non-irradiated food.

Gold is a pretty, shiny rock and rich people like pretty, shiny things so they can display their superiority to no-gold-having proles. Just about everybody on the planet knows gold is highly valuable. It is fundamentally a superior store of value than bitcoin if you’re talking about notable global disruptions, even without going into the actual tech.

Yeah, that angle never worked out for me. If we imagine instead the world became hyper-capitalistic (even more than today), then I could see that digital and untracable (not Bitcoin) decentralized money might have a big influence, but in the opposite scenarios, I don't think there is a lot of need for cryptocurrencies.

Where is your gold? Buried in your garden? Or is it an accounting entry at some commodities trading firm?

You can easily trade gold until someone can force it from you.

The amount of gold you can realistically conceal is less than a year of your salary.

A year of my salary is between 1lbs to 2lbs of gold at current prices. Hiding a few pounds of something isn't very difficult, I do it every Christmas.

It might be worth considering why drug deals are always portrayed as a high stakes, dangerous event (it's because to do the sale, the physical products have to all be in one well known place where everybody knows both the place and time).

How would you go about using 1lb of gold to procure food, water and fuel in a crisis bad enough to disable government/banking?

History has shown than people usually lose all their gold in situations like this, pretty much all the time.

A hacksaw? Just cut it into smaller chunks.

Fur future readers: I was making a joke about Christmas dinner if that wasn't clear.

> goons pressganging people into dying in the trenches so they take your bitcoin hoarding neighbor instead

Wouldn't they just take your gold and pressgang you? Double win for them.

> You can easily trade gold if ww3 starts

If you want something you can trade post ww3 also stockpile alcohol, tobacco, coffee, etc. . Small luxuries everyone will be willing to trade for in a post war country.

Sugar and salt are non-perishable if stored in right conditions. Later one does not get too much use. But first one can be turned to drugs and those are always popular.

This can’t be a serious comment. If ww3 starts the respective countries central banks will keep the gold for themselves. You are so naieve if you think any government is going to honour the fact that you have a piece of paper that saya you own some gold in their vault.

It is not like they haven't done lot to collect it off the population in such scenarios during previous crises. My guess is that if WW3 breaks out. For duration your gold will have rather little use. At best you get price set by government. At worst it will be confiscated. And black market will probably be only place to use it.

And post WW3. If there is economy left. It will be while before people lock back on gold.

> Gold is a pretty, shiny rock and rich people like pretty, shiny things so they can display their superiority to no-gold-having proles. Just about everybody on the planet knows gold is highly valuable.

But isn't this all based on belief? What if you break the spell? During the Dutch Tulip Mania you could've replaced "gold" with "tulip" and changed a few adjectives and it was the same until the spell broke... I don't see the difference to Bitcoin, GME, or TSLA, "I'm going to hoard this because tomorrow (for an infinite amount of tomorrows) someone else will want to buy it at a higher price!".

Yeah yeah yeah, gold can also be used for technology (e.g. as a non-reactive metal), but copper is useful in technology too...

Sheep is probably a better thing to own. You can eat it, or you can take its wool to make clothes to keep yourself warm. You can't eat gold.

Gold has been used as a store of value for bascially all of recorded human civilization.

Sheep get sick and die, and you have to feed them.

Civilization has had a habitable planet for the entirity of its run. When food and water are scarce, what good will metal do?

Yeah, when food and water are scarce, rearing sheep will be hard too.

Also what are you going to do when your tiny gold coin is worth thousands of dollars? Shave off tiny flakes of it and trade it for eggs?

You could write on a piece of paper that says you promise to give the bearer of that paper gold of the equivalent value..

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