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Comment by facepalm | Hacker News Reader

Actually I find the problem of stashing gold very tricky. A bank vault seems like a bad idea because of the history when the government seized the gold and people weren't allowed to open their bank safes without a policeman.

Hiding it at home seems risky because of burglaries.

I haven't found a solution yet, that's why I don't own any gold.

With bitcoin, at least I can spread the risk, like putting a part of the "secret" into a bank vault, hide part at home, at a friends house, whatever. The risk of a simultaneous burglary in two unrelated houses seems low.

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You buy shares in GLD ETF which holds physical gold for you. The risk is that SPDR collapses or get their assets stolen.

You can also buy gold futures on the futures/commodity exchange which is a contract that specifies the other party has to deliver gold to you in the future. The risk is that the financial system collapses and the broker/clearing broker cannot uphold the contract anymore.

So it depends on your intention for buying gold, if it's to hedge against inflation or market crashes, buy a gold tracking security will be fine. If it's to be used as a doomsday currency, then I think you're better off hoarding canned tuna, vodka and guns; things that you can either barter with, or use to force other human beings to do your wish.

Not sure how practical canned tuna would be - seems to me you would need a lot of storage?

In general I agree. Only storing guns seems even more difficult than gold. I live in a country where it is not a normal thing, and statistics seem to point out that gun ownership increases risk of being shot. But in a doomsday scenario, I suppose having a gun would be a good idea :-/

> I think you're better off hoarding canned tuna, vodka and guns;

Epic :)

Unfortunately, it's a reality in many third world countries whose governments restrict imports, like Argentina and Venezuela (I'm mostly familiar with Argentina, where president Kirchner calls hoarders "unpatriotic").

"A bank vault seems like a bad idea because of the history when the government seized the gold and people weren't allowed to open their bank safes without a policeman."

You've got bigger issues at that point.

> Actually I find the problem of stashing gold very tricky.

This, and plus the fact that in almost every country on Earth now, buying Gold needs an ID of some sort so that governments know exactly where to look for Gold the day they want to seize it. I think one of the last places where you can buy Gold anonymously is Switzerland.

EDIT: and you have to trust that the Gold you buy is real. There's always the risk it's gold plated tungsten or something.

That is interesting. Does it matter which amount of gold you're buying, or do you have to show ID in any case?

I haven't bought a lot of gold, but I've never been asked for ID here in East Europe. Go to kiosk, buy coins with cash and that's it.

I think there is a minimum quantity for buying Gold anyway, most of the times. When you purchased Gold in East Europe, how did you make sure your Gold was authentic by the way ?

They sell gold on ebay and in most jewelry stores you can buy 24k jewelry which is almost pure

> ebay

Same thing, how do you ensure the Gold is authentic ?

> jewelry stores

That is true, but you won't buy Gold at a good price in this way, there is a premium on jewelry versus gold coins in weight, for example.

People are still upset about 1933, I see. It's an interesting case as both a huge widespread human rights violation (leaning very heavily on the concept of "public interest") while being part of a set of measures which greatly improved the productive (rather than hoarding) side of the economy.

I would buy gold as an insurance against an economic crisis. In an economic crisis, drastic measurements by the government seem likely.

For example recently in Greece the exact thing happened that people always worry about: home ownership was suddenly being heavily taxed, because those house owners have little way to hide their assets.

In general governments try to prevent the population from using alternative currencies (usually it is illegal). So if in an economic crisis gold would become too much of a live currency, countermeasures by the government seem very likely.

So robbing people is actually striking a blow for economy prosperity? Right, I'm sure all those greedy Jews were wrecking things by coveting their shiny ducats... they should learn to share right?

Anyway. Turning "hoarding" into a dirty word is one of the last signs an economy is about to tear itself to pieces, just before the baseball bats come out and shop windows start getting smashed. Stay classy though!

I did take pains to point out that it's a human rights violation, but that didn't stop you going straight for the Godwin, did it?

Sorry, you must have missed the part where you actually asserted that theft, the violation of private property, was net healthy for an economy. That's a) impossible b) arrogant and c) heartless. And I'm supposed to be the asshole...

I pass no judgement on whether it was a good thing or a bad thing, but:

> That's a) impossible

Well, that's prima facie not true. It can indeed be possible for theft and violation of private property to be a net good for the economy as a whole.

Again, I stress, I have no idea about this case per se. It's an interesting thought experiment though, as to when the government taking something away from private citizens like that can be good on the whole for an economy.

Taxes would have been a better example.

You can do exactly the same thing with gold, i.e. holding it in different banks in different regulatory districts. If your friend's house is burgled or burned down. The one advantage of Bitcoin in this respect is that you can back it up in case of disk failure, house burning down, etc.

That's different than using Shamir's Secret Sharing [1] to split the private key/seed across multiple safe deposit boxes.

If one safe deposit box full of gold is stolen, that portion of the gold is gone. If a safe deposit box containing 1/5th of a Shamir's Secret Sharing secret is stolen, the secret can't be reconstructed by the thief, but can be reconstructed by the owner if they still have access to 3 of the 5 pieces (for example).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir's_Secret_Sharing

You can at most hedge against losing everything at once.

It also seems weird to hide a piece of gold at a friends house. Now you expose them to the risk of burglary, as well as to the temptation (in a crisis).

Bitcoin keys are much easier to hide, too.

Unless you had a virus on your computer when you generated the keys, in which case it doesn't matter.

See my comment about hardware wallets: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8885114

For the truly paranoid you could even generate your seed using coin flips or dice rolls... http://www.swansontec.com/bitcoin-dice.html

No that is relatively easy to circumvent by creating the keys offline. The cold storage key never needs to get in contact with the internet.

That's exactly why I think it won't see more than marginal adoption.

The benefits of bitcoin are outweight by having to secure your private key(s) yourself.

> Actually I find the problem of stashing gold very tricky.

Put it in your teeth, facepalm, your teeth!

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