Topic: Bitcoin versus Gold, the conflict (Read 424 times)

We can take a stance that all products that can be used for the same purpose compete with each other, but isn't it a bit silly? Various foods compete for the title of best nutrition, cars compete for the cheapest, most reliable and most friendly to the environment and so on. Does it mean anything to an average user? Id's go with nope.
Bitcoin is there and gold is there. If bitcoin suddenly stops existing all that value won't jump into gold.
From my point, people make choices and these choices not always lead to using the best product according to the researchers or polls, but often the product that goes well with their interests. For that reason, despite gold being used as valuable item for thousands of years, many people (including me) choose unstable bitcoin over it.

I think it is clear that gold is the best and best known and that more people are accustomed to investing in gold, again can be used as personal accessories and in certain parts of the country, gold has been used as a sign of identity. besides that gold is obviously earlier when compared to bitcoin, and I don't have the same thoughts with you that gold money will be transferred to bitcoin. because clearly more people are accustomed to mengivestasikan and not doubtful with gold, in contrast to bitcoin only certain people who already know. obviously bitcoin and gold are different investments and cannot be equated.

I agree with you but Bitcoin's monetization will be the biggest story of this century and it will certainly steal away a large marketcap of Gold as a store of value. On the other hand, I am not sure Gold will be able to keep its status quo given the fact asteroid mining will make Gold supply virtually unlimited.

They are competing in the sense that both are -- or could be -- used as store-of-value assets that hedge against currency failure or devaluation, failure of banking systems like bail-ins, etc. In that sense, they each occupy a certain "market share" of the store-of-value space.

Bitcoin proponents often take the position that since it has some superior characteristics -- predictable scarcity, portability, the ability to be transferred over a communications channel -- it will eat into gold's market share.

And if bitcoin would have a stable price, I don't think it would be as popular as it is today. And what will be its possible uses aside from selling and buying or trading, will it have the characteristic like gold that can be melted out and make something expensive and useful out of it? If price stability is achieve I believe bitcoin will be one of those boring and stagnant currencies

It's not that hard actually, all you need is mercury and some nuclear power but surely it is not so complicated process, in it's core at least. The real problem is the decontamination technique, because the final product is radioactive and this is the moment where 90% of production costs go, of course when you need to make it safe. True, you can't produce gold at the profitable rates, same as other altcoins. Diamonds however... totally different story.

Are the two in competition? I don’t think so. Gold has been in existence for almost from the beginning of the world while bitcoin has just been here since few years ago. I don’t also see they are in conflict. People are comparing investments between the two but both has different characteristics, features and uses.

if you put your dollars into gold at the generational top? sure. that price lasted so little time that it's much more likely people bought at a similar CPI at $200-500 in which case they would have hedged inflation. tbh i don't think you can hold anything for multiple generations and necessarily expect to beat inflation.

i'm talking from a trading perspective. in the last 20 years, gold rose 670% bottom to top, far more than hedging inflation. that's an asset worth trading.

That's without taking inflation into account, which I thought was the whole point of gold. The ATH was in 1980 at $850 which is about $2700 ish today. If you'd put your dollars in then you'd still be over 50% down in your buying power four decades later.

gold's ATH wasn't that long ago---2011. looking at the long term chart, it looks like it's consolidating bullishly as well. i bought some gold a few years ago and will probably buy more if bitcoin bubbles and i have some profits to throw around.

like you said, as long as central banks hoard gold then it ain't going anywhere. and if fiat monies start looking less and less viable, we could start to see gold/silver-backed money again. if not we'll still see lots of demand for hard money in that situation.

As long as governments and central banks hoard gold then it ain't going anywhere. I truly have never met a regular person in my entire life who's ever expressed a desire to own any gold for investment purposes. Maybe it's a different matter in other cultures, but not the one I'm mired in.

And while BTC is lovely and super cool it doesn't have the utter solidity gold has and always will. Gold will be there in 5000 years no matter what. BTC won't. I think gold is a pointless play myself and I would never touch it, it's ATH was nearly 40 years ago and it's still only half that price after inflation, but the ones with real money don't feel that way.

There are dozens of so-called "bitcoin killers" which have better transaction speed and less fees. But for some reason a good old BTC is still in charge with all its flaws. The same things happen with bitcoin - gold competition. Gold have way longer history and larger market cap. But despite all disadvantages that you see it is still one of the most important securities for investment.
Also no one has proved the correlation between gold and bitcoin price and we cand say that someone sold his gold bar to buy some BTC.

Well, hopefully we get to a day that bitcoin is so easy to use that they won't even need to understand bitcoin and blockchain to be able to use it. Just like how people don't understand the world wide web but they're still able to use it with little to no problems. Hopefully in this lifetime.

I totally get why people are comparing both, as they're indirectly competing in the store-of-value category, but yea, like you said, they can definitely coexist. Both have their own advantages and disadvantages.

Yeah right, it is not ideal to consider Bitcoin as the thing to resolve the debt issue rampaging the world in no distance time despite its high volatility. Not everyone would accept bitcoin as payment since they don't even have a single Idea about it. Even if we will let them learn
about the blockchain, they will never get interested to learn so.

Gold is a very traditional asset that you could mine in the deepest part of the soil and also considered as a great resource and
a piece of jewelry because it is a physical asset. I am not against bitcoin but comparing it to gold is something I don't really understand.

I agree with most of what you said. But I don't think bitcoin is limited as a payment currency, but also as a store of value(as most people think also). Not because Satoshi said it was made for electronic payments it doesn't automatically mean we should only use it solely for that purpose.

IMO there's no conflict at all. Both of them can coexist, and there's no need to find which is superior to what. That's not necessary if you want to make money. Just buy them both and hold.

Tbh I believe this "conflict" was created in order to influence the demand/supply of the market for both assets. I see many times people try to encourage others to buy Bitcoin because it's better than this and that. While Bitcoin true purpose was for electronic payment according to what satoshi wrote in the whitepaper.

Superior for now solely due to gold's price stability. Imagine bitcoin being stable in price in the future, it would be FAR more superior compared to gold. Just the thought of bitcoin being digital whereas you'd have to store a heavy metal on your home or needing to entrust it to someone; that itself makes bitcoin superior in my opinion. And that's just the tip of the iceberg!

I really don't get all this drama around BTC and gold.

BTC wasn't created to be only a store of value, but a currency which let you make the transactions banks say you can't do.

Gold is only a store of value, and in that aspect it is probably superior to btc, as gold will always be gold and it has many other uses.

I do not understand the reason for competing between bitcoin and gold. Why do not people use both? What's the problem with using both? why would we have to choose one and leave the other? it makes no sense. In my opinion this competition is in the minds of people who live their lives competing with other people.


I think like that too


bitcoin and gold do not have brains, they do not think, it's the people who think badly that they are creating such divisions

Having a high supply of silver and other metals and minerals doesn't make gold less scarce. Also, forks doesn't matter. They're a separate chain. I can also print my own paper money, say, let's call it LUL dollars. I'm pretty sure me printing my LUL dollars doesn't increase the supply of my country's local currency.

Sure. BCH is definitely one of the most successful among the other bitcoin forks. If BTC and BCH both have equal amounts of network effect and global adoption, then I'd probably consider that argument. But as of now? I really don't see it.

I don't think the scarcity argument for btc holds much value.  Altcoins have captured a large percentage of the crypto market and forks can be created at anytime.  People hate on bitcoincash but its still a top 5 coin and it sort of doubled the coin supply of bitcoin holders.  Now go and try to create more gold and see how difficult it is.

Limited availability of both assets mentioned is what makes them valuable, though gold has an edge since it can be used into something else apart from being just a storage of wealth and assets.


The volatility of bitcoin's price is what ultimately lured in a lot of people (traders specifically) in the cryptomarket. Without it, I don't think we'll be here right now discussing which is better between gold and bitcoin.

Also, no, I don't think bitcoin will ever solve the problems of debt created by the fiat system. Never in the entirety of its existence will it be able to attend to the ill-effects of QE.


Whichever suits best for whatever situation is where my money would go, surely. It's a given fact that people will choose gold over bitcoin in most cases due to the former having proved its value for centuries now though in the event that bitcoin proved itself superior over gold, people would surely start putting their money on the said digital currency/asset.

No one really knows, but as bitcoin improves in the long term, I think a significant amount of money will move to bitcoin; though not 100%, because gold still has unique use-cases that bitcoin doesn't have.

Depends what your goal is. If you want a speculative investment that could potentially rise or drop huge percentages, then hold bitcoin. If you wanted something that's truly stable and that can work really well as a store-of-value, go with gold(for now).

With holding gold, you'd have to trust a custodian to hold the gold for you. Well, you can hold the gold yourself but I'm not sure if that's a good idea security-wise. With bitcoin, there is no custodian(assuming you're using your own non-custodian wallet), but the risk comes if you aren't decently tech-savvy and you have no idea from protecting yourself from hackers.

Not sure how assets can outsmart themselves lol 🤷‍♂️

This speculations that Bitcoin will overshadow Gold at the long-run is an hot topic being discussed by major players. Although they have some similarities which among them is the scarcity, there can only be 21 million bitcoins, while there are around 180,000 tons of the major commodity gold in the world. Financial institution and experts has been describing Bitcoin to resolved the debt issue rampaging the world in no distance time despite the high volatility of Bitcoin from nearly $20,000 in late 2017 and crashed to $3000 range in first quarter of 2019 but still enjoyed the decentralization advantage. I am not doubting this as almost everybody like FREEDOM, this is what Bitcoin is enjoying over other high rated commodities like Gold.

Will the money in trillion of Dollars be shifted to Bitcoin from Gold in future making the later less redundancy or the two are not competitive to each other? Why is always the question which one is better to HOLD (Bitcoin or Gold). What is the danger of HOLDING the two? Can one outsmart the other in the near future, I am just keen to know due to a lot of argument around these two commodities.

I am of the opinion that the two are here to stay and I am in serious doubt that one will bow to another but what did you think. Kindly correct me with facts.

Thank you