Topic: BTC is scarcer than gold. - page 8. (Read 2074 times)

Of course bitcoin is a digital currency which is created by man and awarded as block reward through mining while gold is a natural element that nature blessed humanity with, what guarantee do we now have about the presence of gold on other planets, earth has all the best of living creation which is human and we have develop the whole economy to the suitability of making use of a digital asset like bitcoin to make living worth it, everyone can have access to bitcoin despite it worth and it can be easily acquired with maximum safety unlike gold.

I guess this kind of comparison is somehow obvious as a lot of people refer BTC as the "digital gold" where its inflationary value are similarly alike to gold's limited resources.

The problem with BTC is that its supply is nearly capped to 21 million, whereas gold, while the latter is a non-renewable resource, has the potential of increasing its supply by constant discovery in our ecosystem. With technologies advancing as years passed by, there are tons of potentials being discovered by the world into learning if gold is truly that "scarce" as many had believed it on.

Unlike in BTC, everyone knows that its supply is limited and by the year 2140, all of these BTCs would be mined completely.

Maybe Bitcoins value will become more than $xxx,xxx . Who knows the future?
Yes what we can do now is act smartly and predict the future.
If possible, we should buy as much Bitcoins as we can for the long term, no matter what’s the price of Bitcoins.
Many have already predicted, so do I am saying, in the next 3-5 years, you will be considered as a Bitcoin millionaire if you have atleast 10 BTCs in your wallet.
But these dumb people lately are panicking and selling their Bitcoins at the current point of time.
Nevertheless wise people have always known the concept of Bitcoins, and I am sure they are buying as much Bitcoins as they can right now.

Carrying gold is not safe, no one does it, just like no one carries their ledger with them. All meaningful investments love silence and secure storage. I personally think that bitcoin and gold are good investments. Gold has been time-tested, it has only become more expensive over the centuries, and this is an indicator for me. Bitcoin is still relatively young, but has already gained a reputation as a good investment tool, so there is nothing wrong with investing in gold and bitcoin.

Op is right that there's gold outside Earth and that makes for a potential problem regarding treating it as scarce because it might get possible to mine it. Also, I believe we don't know for sure how much gold there is even on Earth, right? Isn't it possible that some new reserve would be discovered at some point? So we don't know the real total supply of gold. As for Bitcoin, we do know it for sure, even though we don't know how much BTC was lost (burned, lost private keys, accidentally sent to altcoin addresses etc). We can be pretty sure there will never be more than 21 million BTC. But I don't think we can reasonably compare scarcity of something digital with something physical. We can measure BTC per coin, but how shall be measure gold, and who's to say that it should be measured in this specific way? Or do we measure it by value in USD (obviously, disregarding everything outside Earth), but then the price of BTC changes quite drastically. So they are just to different to be compare, apart from the fact that we can't know the total supply of gold and the rate at which the circulating supply would increase, while we know these things about Bitcoin.

As I wrote in a previous post, there is no doubt that the transfer of value through Bitcoin is incomparably faster and easier than when it comes to gold, but there is also no doubt that gold is very easily understood by the average Joe than Bitcoin which is why the market cap of gold is $11+ trillion. This dinosaur may be a thing of the past for some, but it will be a long time before Bitcoin approaches the point where it will become equal.

As for payment, I have never seen anyone accept gold as a direct way to pay for anything (although some say that in some countries there is such a practice), but here we can not make any comparisons between something that exists in physical form and something that exists in the virtual world.

Yeah, one day it will be mineable. Probably after a thousand years.
After several centuries, the people will have so advanced technologies, that they won't be needing precious metals like gold and silver anymore.
Mining gold will become pointless, because gold will become cheap or worthless. Mining gold on asteroids and other planets will be 100 times more expensive, which would mean 100 times more pointless.  



Gold is hard to move around, if you want to move a ton. Moving small parts of gold isn't a problem for anyone.


Utility and demand are as important as scarcity(or maybe even more important).
You can have a scarce resource/asset, but if this asset is useless and has zero demand, the value/price would still be zero. Scarcity doesn't matter in that case.

Bitcoin is 21M in total supply
Gold is infinite in total supply

Scarcer or not, people can do the simple comparison between them. In addition, it is more convenient when you use Bitcoin for transactions, payments, etc. It is portable too with your wallet, a backup in a notebook, paper sheet, steel sheet, USB, hardware wallets ...

You can not carry your gold bars around and say it is safe for your gold bars as well as your life.

The lost gold must also be counted. Because gold miners only mine where there is a pool. Gold will not be recycled when it becomes dust flakes during the forging process or is formed into jewelry.

Talking about scarcity, it's still weird that the gold stock predictions (which you think) are immeasurable but banks don't try to balance the value of each minted dollar with the actual amount of gold backing.

gold is the result of natural wealth, no human knows how much gold is still in the bowels of the earth while btc is made by satoshi with a certain amount so comparing btc with gold in my opinion is unethical.

Dont forget Gold has its uses in Medical, Electronics and Scientific areas.


Scarcity wise Golds supply is indeed unknown. Nobody knows when the next vein or
large deposit is going to be discovered, and Bitcoin is obviously the opposite to this.

Why do we not compare Bitcoin to Palladium or Platinum instead of Gold?

Actually, if you search rare metals on google, Gold doesnt register!

indeed in this case it is quite true but in this case I don't think it is suitable for comparison although indeed in these 2 things they have something in common, namely they are suitable for investment.
but for the supply of btc and gold maybe I don't want to compare things like this because they are not very suitable for comparison.
gold is a real wealth of nature today and indeed their existence is enough to make people suddenly rich but in this case bitcoin is still something that is risky and indeed even though bitcoin's strength is far superior in terms of volatility but the comparison of things like this is too far to compare anything unrelated

I don't think there's any competition going on between Bitcoin and Gold. Gold has been a treasure for thousands of years whereas BTC is not even up to two decades.

I think the focus should be on making Bitcoin as popular and acceptable as Gold because as of today Gold is still miles ahead of Bitcoin in terms of adoption and popularity and many people still don't understand what Bitcoin is all about.

I was going to ask this same question. How accurate could the amount of unmined gold be determined?
Is it the same data that was used to calculate how old the earth is and when the earth will stop existing?

Talking about gold scarcity. Gold can be refined, it can be reformed or reshaped and it is still a gold. It is natural.

Bitcoin in the other hand is created by man, and a btc converted to usdt is lost (I don't know if this analogy is correct)

OP, When we say about scarcity, we also say about availability. If I want to buy $100m worth of btc in few minutes time, I could get, is it also applicable to gold?

To me the fact that we know exactly how much bitcoin will exist and how much is left to mine makes bitcoin a unique currency, after all we do not know how much gold is really out there, there are estimations about the gold left to mine but there could be more or less gold than the estimations.

And as you mention in the case our technology reaches a certain point then the gold in space could become available causing its supply to increase tremendously, while the supply of bitcoin could only increase if there was a change on the source code, which is something that will not happen.

I could start with the fact that's not even 100% certain how much gold is still available to be mined. I don't know how accurate the current estimations are.
Then, yes, gold does exist in space, and I would not be surprised if it would get attempted to be mined from there, if it will be proven to be more useful than just getting hoarded by the richer entities (especially since such a move could melt its current price).

Bitcoin has kinda same problem: if people stops hoarding it, the price may go lower than most of us would like. It doesn't have to be mined from outer space.


While I do agree that Bitcoin is scarcer than the total gold in the universe, especially according to our perception, I would not try to prove this because.. what to compare: kg with BTC, gram with satoshi, atom with.. what? since "tomorrow" the community could decide that one satoshi is too big (compared to whatever paper money) and we need more digits after the decimal point, and 16 looks just fine for the job.


This goes to speculation area

That is one pro Bitcoin has over gold, but remember that if you must speculate with Bitcoin you have to expect great ROI in the long run, as Bitcoin doesn't really maintain its value for a long period of time like gold, it is volatile, and short term investors sometimes lose their funds and do not make any returns, gold on the other hand is a store of value/safe haven asset, and that is one pro gold has over Bitcoin. I am just trying to point out that the two have advantages over the other.
Gold is physical, but you could still own gold and nobody would know you do so, it is up to you, there are Bitcoin users who tell everyone they own Bitcoins as well, i think this point depends a whole lot on the user/how they use their asset.

I believe many lost gold would be found, just in my opinion.

I am also surprised for someone to compare the gold that has been mined when the earth if full of gold and there are hard to reach place for mining gold like earth crust. If what I have read in the past is true, the gold in the earth crust can cover the whole surface of the earth in 4 meters thick. If the earth crust is not possible to reach or humans can not advanced technology to, to mine gold, how about the gold under water, under the ocean, which is very far more than the gold on the surface of the earth, but, that none has been mined before, it could be possible in the future that technology could advance to the extent those gold under oceans could be mined, but that is just my thought, I can be wrong about it.

How about the gold existing on the earth surface, scientists give estimates, but the gold existing on the surface can still be more, if there is estimation of 122 billion metric tons of gold on the earth surface, and only 165,000 metric tons are yet mined, I think there is still enough gold on earth surface to still be considered unlimited. I may be wrong, I will like your take on this, but I do not believe in the saying that only little amount of gold are not yet mined, it is still unlimited.

Gold at least is for sure more scarce than other metals/resources. I remember when they were saying we were running out of oil and then they kept discovering more and more deposits, without even mentioning diamonds that are one of the biggest lies ever.

People sooner or later will get more used to bitcoin as something that is digitally scarse, I understand that for the moment may be something difficult to understand/accept.

As of now the acceptability of BTC is  not too wide. If its the basis for the comparison, gold is prbably preferred.

Thew world.however is preparing to go digital which if currencies will be back to gold standard like what China and Russia plans to be. I think digital currencies backed by gold and BTC will be accepted as medium of exchange.