Author

Topic: Bitcoin Rush vs. Gold Rush in the american west - So Similar (Read 553 times)

sr. member
Activity: 320
Merit: 250
Cool story bro. This is so true that it is like Bitcoin rush today. What the outcome be the same?
legendary
Activity: 1442
Merit: 1000
Its definitely similar in the fact that the people who got rich were
the people selling the mining equipment, not the miners themselves.

unless they were doing it very early obviously.
legendary
Activity: 3332
Merit: 6809
Cashback 15%
Sure, I totally get where you're coming from.   Bitcoin--and cryptocurrency in general--definitely has a wild west vibe to it.  I think about that when I use exchanges like yobit, where you can do trades that wouldn't fly in the stock market.  And that's because crypto hasn't been regulated to death yet.  It's kinda neat.  What's not neat are all the wild west scams that go on.
legendary
Activity: 1904
Merit: 1073
Yea, Bitcoin were designed to simulate gold in more ways than one... I do not think Satoshi meant for it to mimic the human behaviour, but the diminishing supply definitely. I like the way you

compared ETH with fools gold, because you are 100% correct... the thing is most people cannot spot the difference, and then they chase the wrong technology. The CPU/GPU mining phase was

definitely the gold rush days in Bitcoin, but lately the bigger organizations have pushed out most of these smaller operators and they now dominate the scene.  Sad
sr. member
Activity: 308
Merit: 250
The mind is everything. What you think you become.
sr. member
Activity: 364
Merit: 250
Before we  start, I am a believer that things happen in cycles on an astrological basis, while advancing things forward. Leaving spirituality and my beliefs and meditation work out of this however, I see many parallels to the Gold Rush of 1848. This was kind of a lightbulb moment for me.

I am 21 now, at the age of 15 and 16, I called it wrong when I opened the bitcoin client, and promptly uninstalled it, and continued writing my book without research. If I had typed setgenerate = true, left and HODLed... well what is done is done, those years were an amazing ride, in any case.

Now to the similarities:

For starters, the earliest in struck it rich.

There was an arms race to get better and better digging equipment / arms race to get better mining hardware and chips

As the gold got harder to mine, people pooled resources working together to mine more / The rise of bitcoin mining pools happened

Many attempts to scam miners making the journey / many ASIC pre-order scams

Selling goods and services to gold miners was more profitable than mining in its own right later on / It is easier to make bitcoins doing stuff other than mining

people invested their life savings to make the journey to California / People dumped life savings and capital into bitcoin ASIC equipment

Selling shovels became more profitable than mining the gold themselves / ASIC manufacturers can make more money in a similar way

Miners stayed in an area only to determine how profitable it was before jumping ship if it wasn't / people pool hop or mine altcoins to convert to BTC, other than that, the altcoins are useless to them, the rise of multipools.

Most late arrivals wound up loosing money / many of those who missed the train of easy mining lost money

Gold rush mining expended a lot of energy and time / bitcoin mining costs a lot in electricity

The more mining the gold, the harder it was for one individual to find it, some went alone and struck lucky / bitcoin difficulty rise, some solo mined and hit it lucky. Using a tiny rig to solo mine is like using a weak shovel in hopes of finding that lucky gold nugget.

The latest techniques for mining the gold were difficult for the average joe to use unless trained in its use / power consumption of industrial operations are way more than many house circuits can handle.

The increased gold supply caused a drop in the value of silver at the time (now remember, silver now has many more industrial uses than then) / Litecoin was at $50 a coin, being silver to bitcoin's gold. Litecoin tanked as bitcoin became more mainstream, although it is still 'silver' for want of a better word.


ONE KEY difference: Searching Wikipedia articles and the references attached to it and from books I read doing my history BTEC years ago however, was the white man overall made more profits than the Chinese/Asian. In the bitcoin world however, it is the other way around, suggesting a power shift on some level that people have not yet realized. China have all the industry and hold nearly all the cards with manufacturing. It is in essence, asias turn.

The gold rush ended when more complex techniques to mine it had been created and essentially it wasn't possible for any tom dick and harry to mine  with a shovel.

The halving (the income of gold miners was reduced more gradually) if the gold rush is anything to go by, the price will not spike for a while, until the recourse is more scarce. As there are still many in the pipeline  and on the market.


I run the risk of looking silly by saying that the next generation of miners may be the last ones that home users can easily use, large scale mining farms and operations is pushing the little guy out (for profits only), many old and outdated hardware can either be soloed for lotto purposes (to help with decentralization) or otherwise switched off and may make its way to landfill or hopefully recycled, or utilized by someone with extremely cheap power. This is just my personal opinion.

Once it gets to this stage, imagine loads of home miners just mining with a single rig on their own node, totalling probably several petahashes across the whole network. Some of those are bound to strike it lucky.

Litecoin may be the little guy's coin, just how silver can be the little guy's investment. But both equally usable for their intended purposes.

The lightning network meaning you essentially have the value of your coins tied up in multisig wallets on the blockchain, just how gold was supposed to back paper currency in the original idea. The lightning network 'coins' are backed by the blockchain, and can be moved on and off blockchain at will?

Key difference here is gold is a physical metal, bitcoin is merely a set of inputs and outputs on a ledger worth something because people tie value up in it.

If I were to follow the herd here, and go for the next ASIC hardware, I am unsure if its worth doing that and theres speculation and silence from the 'shovel' manufacturers and end users. So I took the best shovel still available to me, and put it where much less people are looking, in a multipool with an ASIC rig with still good life left in it (the titan), soon that area will be cleared too if more jump on the scrypt bandwagon, or it may be the forgotten stepchild. A smaller mine out of the main focus.

Either way the manufacturing of new 'shovels' for scrypt will take some time, time I am utilizing. I do not want to follow the herd in this case. Unless one is doing it for a hobby or has cheap power, mining bitcoin directly, its very late in the game. Maybe I can then sell my shovel when the time is right.

But for those who believe in cycles or advancement as a result of a cosmic plan, or even if they don't this whole scenario mirrors the gold rush in so many ways. And the gold rush is nearly over, bitcoin stabilizing in a way, weather or not individuals or farms make a profit.

Thoughts from anyone?

I can speculate, but I think ETH is fools gold (this is speculation only) and it will be seen to be this, and that bitcoin is the real gold. I feel those who invested MILLIONS into ETH will end up bagholders. I could be wrong, but I just cannot see how it will last. But I am astounded at the amount of money people poured into it. Trading real established 'gold' (bitcoin) for this new kid on the block  with little research on it.

I am saving up to go off the grid and I made my titan investment hoping that helps me, 0.044 BTC a day on average atm, with less risk many are going to come with their shovels and knock me over until im finished due to the constrained scrypt ASIC supply.

I am hoping bitcoin becomes more recognised as a store of value, but am also storing assets in silver (gold is at an all time high, more expensive than platinum last time I looked this year), ready to cash out when I buy some land and build my off grid log cabin with its own solar panels water collection, septic system, etc.
 
I wont be spending my life paying a mortgage to a bank. And the idea of supporting something no one entity can control? My savings under my control and responsibility? I am all ears. I run a full node with a bit of hashrate pointed to it, I solo at CKs solo pool, I hope that I can in some way contribute to the security of the bitcoin blockchain. Once my titan has ROI I am going to solo litecoin to secure its network. The blockchain is an innovation that can help free humanity in my opinion. I can now transact without a bank or big brother telling me what I can and can't transact. I send the money to a place of my choice, in exchange for this, the user is responsible. Totally. For their private keys. No bank or recourse, this is the price one pays for freedom of that kind.

Fractional reserve banking is doomed to fail. But, the likenesses between the bitcoin rush and the gold rush are just too similar to ignore.
Jump to: