Topic: Bitcoin will never be as good as gold and why ultimatly it will fail. - page 2. (Read 9433 times)

You have no clue what you're talking about.



That opinion says more about your skewed perspective than about gold.



?!!!

What are you, a billionaire?! $150,000 in gold is only 100 ounces... not even 10 pounds. Try carrying that around using $20 bills.



Moreso than... what? Silver? Cash? Land? Seriously, what are you trying to compare gold to that this would even pop up in your mind?



Again, what is your basis for comparison? Of course you dont buy bread with an ounce of gold. I dont pay the pizza guy with a $100 bill either. Gold is one of the most liquid assets in the world as far as actually exchanging assets though.



I'll say it again... if gold were as common as dirt, we would be using it everywhere... the only reason we don't is because its scarcity makes it too precious. If you can't even understand why it would be so useful, then you really need to quit trying to talk about it, otherwise you just sound ignorant and clueless.

You are ignoring a little something called network effects. Gold2 exists and it's called platinum, palladium or many rare earth or long lived isotopes that can only be produced in nuclear reactors and are highly valuable for modern medicine. There's great value of being the first, and gold was.

Well yes. The same is true of fiat currency and precious metals, though. The fact is that there will always be competition no matter what you're talking about. It is unrealistic to expect to sustain a monopoly on anything, though near-monopolies will inevitably arise from time to time. But you don't see people dumping their Facebook shares just because Google's starting a social network of their own, thus diluting Facebook's value. And you certainly don't see people dumping gold because someone struck a fresh, rich (rhetorical) vein of silver that'll double the total amount of silver in the world.

The fact is that P2P currency is an entire category of exchange unto itself. Bitcoin doesn't need to be the only player in order to retain its value. If new P2P currencies spring up, they will face the same uphill battles against Bitcoin that new statist currencies against the other more established statist currencies.

To go from "oh no, there will be competition" to "we will fail" is a huge non-sequitur. Anyone who does anything worth doing should expect competition, but that does not mean they should expect to fail. On the contrary: knowing they will have competition, they should work all the harder so that when competition does arise they will be able to meet it and overcome it.

I don't really see how that has any major affect on the value of BTC or Gold. Gold is a commodity, whilst BTC is a P2P currency so there's obviously going to be the differences you pointed out, that doesn't mean one is better than the other.

trentzb, good question. I am referring that P2P currencies will inflate in supply and their value will go down causing people not to use them as a store of value. Yes you would beable to exchange between P2P currencies and that is the very thing, the total amount of P2P currency in existence would increase. The better way to think about it is not in terms of total supply of bitcoin currency, but as in total supply of P2P currency as they are all the same, ofcourse different ones would have more on issue and others would have larger market penetration which would influence their value. As a new P2P currency is created, the greater amount of P2P currency would be on issue.

Gold is only worth how much people are willing to pay for it.

Part of that is input energy.

Gold requires energy to mine.

Bitcoins require energy to mine.

What's the difference?

Bitcoins are much more easily concealable, transferable and encrypt able.  Gold is cumbersome and hard to deal with.

Other P2P currencies would only cause Bitcoin to fail IF there was high demand for the other currencies, AND no one was trading those other currencies for Bitcoin. The high demand for the other currencies would make investment move from Bitcoin to the other P2P currencies initially, causing Bitcoin's value to drop. If Bitcoin was then to go on a marketing and advertising rally, it would probably get more investment as popularity grew for it again. Just my thoughts anyway.

I don't really get how alternate p2p currencies would cause Bitcoin to fail. If you store value in Bitcoin and there are 10 other p2p currencies you would of course be able to exchange value between them via any number of exchange houses that would pop up. Bitcoin hasn't really caused other virtual currencies (p2p or not), to fail has it?

Sweft, none of your arguments make any logical sense.

Firstly, Gold is only costly store and guard, due to how much Gold is worth. If Gold was worth a lot less, no one would bother paying to guard it. Also, you say it's only worth as much as people are willing to pay? That's how EVERYTHING gets its price. BTC is only worth as much as people are willing to pay for it. If the value of BTC was to skyrocket, I'm sure some people with a lot of money might invest in securing their wallets and computers more so than usual.

Silver, copper, aluminum, platinum, palladium?

Gold is the most useless commodity.

Copper, silver, oil, wheat all have multiple uses.  Gold is pretty much useless to me and I could care less if it cost 1$ or 1000000$.  It's difficult to transport and costly to store and guard.  It makes no sense as a store of value or currency, since it's difficult to exchange.  It is a store of value in as much as quacks are willing to buy it and opprotunistic quacks are willing to mine it for them at significant profits.

So what?  There is no problem with competition from future emerging P2P currencies.  Competition is good.  Let the weak ones die and the fittest survive.

You are right, I did not properly respond. You said that the incentive to switch will be that it would be more lucrative. I do no think this is true because just like bitcoin the new bytecoin will be a fiat currency. Mining insane amounts of bytecoin will help nothing if nobody wants bytecoin. Everybody wants the existing and working bitcoin. => The price of bytecoin will be ridiculously low and never rise.

bitcoin is not to bytecoin as bitcoin is to gold: There acre clear incentives to switch from gold (easier to handle and illegal transactions). Bytecoin has nothing to offer (I disproved you point that it is lucrative).

A lot of quality programming time has been put into bitcoin. It's a solid system (as far as we know, so far). I think that's what makes it valuable.

Gold is stupid and useless.

em3rgentOrdr, no I am not talking about bitcoins forking into different versions, I believe those forks will be worthless and I never mentioned forks. The issue is the emergence of competing P2P currencies.

astonix, P2P currency is potentially limitless in quantity, Gold can not have different competing 'versions' or 'flavors'. If bitcoins reached a stable value for P2P currency due to supply & demand, it reached an equilibrium finally in the market and it's price stabilized at $50, well if 10 new different flavors of P2P came out onto the market, had the same amount of 'units' in circulation and the use of each of these different flavors became equal to bitcoin, then bitcoin's value would fall by 10 times. The amount of P2P currency in existence would increase by 10 times making the orginal bitcoin worth less.

Tell me, if a competing P2P came out tomorrow and you could earn 10 times as many 'units' as you could with bitcoin, ofcourse everyone would jump onto the new P2P currency to mine it until the amount and difficulty came inline with bitcoin. People are not just going to stick to Bitcoin because it is 'Bitcoin' and was the first one to come out on the internet.

Hans0, "Bitcoin is not just Gold, it is Gold 2.0: anonymous and uncontrollable. There is an incentive to switch to bitcoin, but no incentive to switch to bytecoin cause it is just the same with the single difference that nobody demands it."

People will use the other P2P currencies, there is no reason why only bitcoin will be the only P2P currency people will demand. I have explained the incentive many times why people will switch, again like many here ignoring what I have written.

comboy, nobody as addressed the rise of competing P2P currencies. Everyone seems to only be fixated on bitcoins limited 21 million unit supply, when infact the issue is P2P currency in existance, not simply one type or flavor of P2P in existence.

I didnt mean to be rude. It's just that when you google or search on the forum, you will discover there were many discussions closely related to what you have wrote. I don't say it's easy to find it, there is a lot of content on forum, but when you read it for some time it gets boring - yet another click with a hope that maybe that guy nailed it, wrote some constructive argument that haven't been discussed on why bitcoin will fail. And then it's yet another "oh no, only 21M", "oh no, another p2p currency will come"

Once again, no offence, I like your post in the way that it provides some kind of let's say reasonable arguments, I just meant for real that maybe separation would help, you would just look in the subforum and then maybe you would reply in some other thread where OP was having similar thoughts as you.

I imagine price volatility will exist for a long while in BTC until we near the 21 million mark, at least at that point the quantity will remain virtually unchanged and it'll have been around long enough to have some sort stable market value.

Or maybe not.

lol

In no particular order:

Mining performs the function of protecting the network.  Smaller networks are vulnerable to attack.  This tends to move the market towards a single block chain.

Falling short of global domination wouldn't really be considered "failure".

Otherwise you're right and you're not the first to point it out.

As new bitcoin forks come about, the market will regulate the value and relative exchange rate for each bitcoin version.  New bitcoin block chains aren't as valuable because their coins will not be accepted at nearly as many vendors as the older more mature block chains.  QED