Topic: Do Bitcoins need something REAL to back them? (Read 7695 times)

Well, philosophically, everything is backed by something. The trick is to make the "further" connections, and use those connection to see further into the future than anyone else.

The problem with something that is "not backed" by something... is that it's usually "backed" by some small group of people's beliefs and ideas about the future - and most people are greedy and only think about themselves, and as such their ideas about what something should do, only includes prosperity for themselves or their world view - history has shown many, many times over how a minority group uplifted themselves on the backs of a majority. Part of the reason Democracy leads to greater peace is because if you look after the majority first, the minority can take care of itself in most instances. It has almost never happened the other way around... power corrupts, is as if it's an inescapable part of our DNA. 

So tangibly seeing or understanding what something is backed by, gives something legitimacy - especially if that "backing thing" is something that is fundamentally necessary.

So we used to use gold as a currency. Then the paper represented the gold... but when people could no longer see the gold, and when banks realized that not everyone comes to ask for their gold at the same time, the banks realized that they can just print as much paper as they like. But they made rules... but there was no way to prove that someone stuck to the rules until Bitcoin arrived.

So eventually, gold got replaced by oil... and because nobody knows *exactly* how much oil there is in the world, even with the strictest rules, banks managed to wangle things to get away with printing even more money.

In principle, not having something tangibly backed by something - ie. restrained by something - sets in motion a slippery slope. If I can print 1 extra bill, why not 2? But if I can do 2, why not 2 000 000 000 000 000 00 000 00 0 0 0 0 0 0 00 .... You get my point? So all the countries in the world are in a race to see who can print the most paper money, without causing an outright crash.

So what is "restraining" bitcoin? Well, it's easy: Processing power, Electricity and Connectivity. All things that we need in our modern economy... so Bitcoin has a barometer to measure itself against. If half the world's processing power gets destroyed, less Bitcoins will be minted... and people will have an incentive to rebuild that... but in rebuilding that, they will also rebuild many other things that has lead to our modern society. They will build power plants and computers... which will allow them do much more than just mint Bitcoin.

So why was oil a good idea? Because oil still is the lifeblood of our economy. If a country runs out of oil, chaos ensues. A handful of countries find themselves in this state - no food in the shops, no fuel at the stations, month-long power blackouts, raids by warlords, civil war. Just remove oil (or coal) and most of the world that we know descends into chaos.

So please... everyone saying "it doesn't need to be backed by anything"... lots of people have said that, but no arguments?! What's the point in saying something if you don't know why you're saying it, or if you're not willing to explain why you're saying it?

There are patterns in nature... if you look at the natural world - what is the closest thing that it has to a currency? ...I'd say it's water. Too much, or too little, causes destruction. Just like banks, water has dams, and just like QE, water has rain... The trick is to have the right balance... and if something is "backed" by the right thing, it has a way to see if it is in touch and has the right balance, to instead of messing things up more, actually making everything better.

Bitcoin is independent of all. It doesnot need to be backed up by anything materialistic.

It is mainly backed up by the ongoing transactions which are validated and added into a block by miners, solving special mathematical notations.
I hope this brief explanation helps

Bitcoin doesn't need to be backed by anything. The only reason anything has value is because people are willing to pay said amount for the product. People is what gives real value to something. Look at how long we've used fiat without anything backing it.

Not sure why this thread got necrobumped, but I do like seeing these old ones. 

Bitcoin doesn't need anything backing it, and it's the same thing with other currencies in the world.  Yeah it used to be the case that each dollar had an ounce of silver behind it, but that turned out to be unnecessary.  If people decide something represents the fruit of their labors (that's what's behind it), it's money.

Before seeing this thread I had the same question. Now I understand the true meaning and value of bitcoin!

Different people generally mean different things when they write "backed by". You need to be careful to explain what you mean when you use the words "backed by".

For example, the words "backed by" mean something different in each of these:

• The dollar is no longer backed by gold and Bitcoin is backed by nothing.
• The dollar is backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government.
• The dollar is backed by the U.S. military.
• The dollar is backed by banks.
• Bitcoin is backed by math.
• Bitcoin is backed by the processing power of the network.
• Bitcoin is backed by electricity.

Aren't all the hashing power and mining farms something very real and tangible?

The network is more powerful than any known supercomputer

I think it doesnt need anything real, simply because there is a limited quantity of it. Just like gold.

The way I see it is Bitcoin is backed by Electricity, Processing Power and Connectivity.

Which is arguably as good a measure of economic potential as oil, if not a better one, considering our modern economy.

Conversely... there are in fact electricity generators, chip-makers and connectivity providers... who are backed by... Bitcoin! Funny, right?!

Perhaps Bitcoin will find its natural place backing technology and services... while oil and minerals can "back" actual products and infrastructure.

The only thing that has to be "real" is the trust that people will value BitCoins higher than other currencies.

You should definitely back up your bitcoins

The 1 USD costs about 2 cents or more to make.  The rest of the value is based on the full faith of the USA.
Bitcoins are generated by spending electricity about 10% of its "value" is the cost to generate it. (my estimates - i can be wrong)
The rest is faith.
The economist in question should explain what the US dollar will and can do.

the worth of bitcoin is peged to the usd.

what can you get for 1 bitcoin?... in general you wont know unless you look up the price of USD per bitcoin.

the usd value is peged to its self... you know what you can get for 1 dollar... .becuase you know what is worth 1 dollar

the value bitcoin is peged to the dollar.. the value of the dollar is peged to its self.

we are not talking economist theroy here... just common sense.

To have a floor valuation, yes, ideally. But, to simply exist (as an easy way to transfer money online) no. If you simply want to send your friend in Russia $100USD it doesn't technically matter what the BTC/USD exchange rate is - he will receive and convert.

Of course, the volatility in the exchange rate makes people (and businesses) hesitant to do those types of transactions.

Just that of user value and supply, but no, not really.

Actually OPEC-pegged oil-prices denominated in current terms of the private Federal Reserve Corporation's private They-Owe-Us Debt-Receipt Notes (FRNs) is the only grand and stable commodity-resource value of importance that supports their value.

The value of the U.Z.S.R.s "dollar" really doesn't have anything to do with the US balance of trade wealth nor any reserved property nor gold wealth nor US wealth nor "good faith" in anything else but trust the fact that the Tory-Bilderberg Trotskyite-Feds Pentagon Communists won't attack their Tory-Trotskyite Saudi Sheikhdoms even if their enraged fanatic populance make hell boil over.

there is only one backing currancy ever has... the knowledge that people will accept them.

thats it...

backing bitcoins with gold... would only help.. becuase you can get USD for gold... or euros for gold... and people know you can get almost anything with USD.


thats the only backing money has... the knoledge other people with accept them.. thats it.

the USD used to be backed by gold.. now its just backed by confidence... (and i think you have to pay ur taxes in usd)

bitcoins are backed by confidence that other people want them and will be willing to give you stuff for it... mainly USD dollars for them.

thats also the problem with bitcoins becoming accepted as real money....  when asked "how much can you get for 1 bitcoin" people run to look up how many dollars bitcoins are trading for, as USD can get you anything and is peged to its self.

I totally agree with you and fear that our failing will be in knowing (or understanding) not what it is that we as a new Global-Bitcoin Nation are actually finally trying to on real terms between only us for the benefit of ourselves alone.

Thanks Melonhead I really appreciate your well considered dissents and i will gladly struggle mightily in kind to answer them to your satisfaction, unless, of course, if and where I have erred  

above I have highlighted everything with which I totally or largely disagree, (and bolded indisputable points) so here go my responses:

First it is a huge generality that turned out to be generally quite wrong (in the latter 20th century days of gold's final demise as a useful "money") that "gold was never a tool of the elites". In fact it was THE TOOL, most largely, though not solely because it was, has been, is, and always will be a chronically far too "limited 'money' supply".

Today, even at best, gold is only a second rate Medium of Savings wealth. If you own more than nearly an ounce of it, you have more than your share of it's "egalitarian" global supply-wealth, which is still ever-shrinking compared to population (and labour wealth's) growths. Gold's egalitarian usefulness as a widely dispersed utility of exchange vanished, along with the broader-based demise of mercantilist "communal-nomic" warfares back in the late 1700's.

Mercantilists chronically kept beating their heads against it's limiting walls by hoarding it through foreign trade surplus only to be faced with the toxin of it's inevitable domestic over-supply, that would reverse the precious trade surpluses they'd hoped would make them wealthier. It took a long time for comparative advantage and the utilities of endogenous money supplies to take hold, and most of that also was, has been and still is quite wrong-headed.

Back in the day while there were still more widely dispersed clutters of gold than there were "labour exchanging" people who needed it's utility as a labour exchange currency it was, as you have pointed out, the most honest, egalitarian and durable triple-use medium of labour exchange value and savings wealth, while also being a commodity in the production of rarely-artistic added-valued luxury goods. But, as the various labour exchanging populations of the planet grew and the economic straight-jackets of it's limited supplies and dispersions did not, things drastically changed.

The first notable exception to your generality is the "local fools-gold" Basic Economics-Arithmetic lesson of Genesis. A "winning", ruthlessly price-gouging grain-monopolist Tory-Menshevik entrepreneur elite dude named Joseph convinces his lord he should exploit their grain business. Subsequent end of the ice-age dry spell crop failures and famine in Egypt then allow Pharaoh (and his elite Menshevik pal) to enslave his entire populance through the tool of their all too foolishly chosen limited resources of gold as their labour exchange currency. Joseph parlays Pharaohs grain monopoly into a labour monopoly (slavery) through the monopoly on gold the grain exchanges "earned" them.

Although gouging is clearly foul I'm not judging the fairness, just pointing out the implications of the broad false assumptions of a finite public labour exchange currency (that is also an entirely separate easily monopolized commodity) and the inevitably poor results of the inevitably terminal-exchange slavery it ultimately always leads people into. Unfortunately people stubbornly refused to learn a basic understanding of the inherently zero-sum counter-economic arithmetic of that fundamental example. Wiki "Endogenous money"...

Meanwhile in the future-past...

Later the elite Sadducee enslavers parlay their monopoly on the false idol of the "Ten Book of the Dead Mosaic Law stone-engravings" that their post-ice age liberator, the ex-Crown Prince thut-Moses left to them, into a desolationist's Soul Wash™ Business Temple monopoly. By cleverly imprisoning their Ark of their Covenant false-idol, containing it's imprisoned stone idolatries within, in an elite "sanctuary prison", they claim to own all proprietary access to Our Parentage Whom are Heaven and the All Itself, and demand silver "half shekel of the sanctuary" "fiat tokens" (that they alone mint) to run their "imprisoned god visiting" Soul Wash™ machine with optional grimy underbody spray.

Since the only way to obtain a much needed Soul Wash™ to impress your (likely rather outraged) neighbors is to trade real assets of true labour-exchange value like gold etc. for worthless 'fiat half shekels" at a Sadducee's convenient "money changers" bank-MTM booth outside their god-prison, the Tory Menshevik Trotskyite Sadducee's once again enslaved their own people. We all know how the evil fiat silver Sadducee Money Changers getting the gold from the residents of Augustus and Tiberius's occupied territories story went and ultimately ended 40 or so years later. Note that/how the cheap silver Temple Shekel is a "special silver coin-token receipt" (derivative) for another, completely separate store of value that it only "represents".

Meanwhile back in Rome...

Back in 50 B.C., the Pontifex Maximus turned Emperor Julius Caesar took back the power to coin Roman labour exchange currency from the private bankstering smithy-coiners and money changers and minted public coins for the public benefit of all. It's important to note the clear inference that the "soul-detergent reserve" bankstering of "temple shekel tokenage" for sporting and/or other commercially monopolized economic activities was obviously a more widespread phenomenon than just in the Soul Wash™ business.

With the profits on selling and renting this new and plentiful public supply of publicly owned and issued labour exchange currency, and standardizing his new calendar for temporal labour-contractual order, Julius was able to complete huge public works projects of unprecedented scale. By making standard public labour exchange currency tokens of assured value plentiful Caesar won the loyalty and admiration of his citizenry, but the still powerful former private local smithy-bankstering coiners and their money changer crony-monopolists hated him. Economic experts believe this was a major motive behind his assassination. With Julius Caesars death came the demise of Roman prosperity. Taxes increased and so did political corruption. Debt usury and debased reserve-derivative coinage became the rule again. Eventually the public labour exchange currency supply of the Roman economy was reduced by 90%, and thus people lost their wealth, lands and enterprises to the smithy banksterers and Rome sewered into the dark ages.

The first paper labour exchange currency was a new "printed paper" receipt for gold (or silver) that was left in a metal/coin smith's vault.

Coin smith receipts (private coin) had long been the norm because they were way better than hauling around, concealing and securing heavier and/or more valuable gems, gold and silver. The coin-smiths banks had always known that only a small fraction of people return to demand their actual gold (or silver) at any one time. Fiat paper was simply a new and even cheaper way to continue conduct their parasitic gold-hoarding frauds. They continued defrauding the public by printing/coining more "fiat counterfeit" labour exchange currency receipts than they had gold or silver to back. They would then loan out "fiat counterfeit" deposit receipts, (cheaper "coin" or paper token) and collect interest on them, paying squat to depositors.

These paper receipts are often falsely cited as the birth of "fiat" Fractional Reserve Bankstering, but it had long been done with other bronze, brass and silver (etc) low "bullion" content token-coinages before it. It is usually defined as defrauding the value of the fruits of all other people's productive labours by parasitically loaning out many times more counterfeit "fiat" labour exchange currency receipts at a profit than there were genuinely conserved assets of labour exchanging value "reserved" to back them with. Fractional Reserve banksterers had for years earlier already long been minting "Fiat Token Coinage" of silver or other more-worthless "fractional" Fiat Coin-Token Receipts foreshadowing their Fiat Paper-Token Receipt scams.

If a metalsmith bankster-parasite had 1000 in resource-asset deposits, he would draw up 10,000 in fiat counterfeit receipt  "money", and lend out this 90% more of fiat-counterfeit receipts to both depositors and non depositors at an even more-parasitic profit. Elite bankstering parasites thus accumulated themselves all of everyone's gold and silver through various (private) fiat counterfeiting reserve-storage schemes.

The issue has always been and still is WHO OWNS AND PROFITS FROM a well moderated and regulated industry of reserve-bankstering (reserve-usury) - not necessarily the honesty or dishonesty of providing for an economy the flexible monetary utilities of it. When our congress (national governments) own, rent-out and control Our Public Labour Exchange Currencies our nations (and thereby us) profit from it. When others own and control it we are all constantly doomed to lose, to "them".

Fortunately or unfortunately, Fiat-valued/devalued Bitcoin poses a really horrific barrier not only to contractors, merchants and entrepreneurs, but to any form of usury and usurers period. It is impossibly Byzantine to even begin to arrange a temporal contract to loan bitcoins in terms of bitcoins. Currently I could loan you a bitcoin with interest in bitcoin today and you could end up paying me back a quarter of my value or owing me three times it's worth tomorrow. My loaning labours might be a total bust or a boon by virtue of random "Physiocratic" chance at any time of any day. Bitcoin such as it is "traded" is a receipt-derivative token that every greedy, self respecting smith would assassinate the purveyors of, melt down and sell off for coffin nails.


You have obviously noted my revulsion at using the lazy epithet 'money' to describe a National Economy's Public's Labour Exchange Currency Tokens. I do so because the term 'money' is a grotesquely imprecise generality that can describe a multiplicity of different subjective "substances" with which people can exchange their savings, efforts and wares.

The inherent relationships between the current values of labourers labours (the only asset we all have to trade/exchange) and the value of their Medium of Labour Exchange Currency are legally binding and irrefutable contractually-temporal obligations, they are not and cannot be cavalierly disregarded as dismissible "assumptions"!

Marx's antique misperceptions that the value of 8 hours of street sweeping work is equivalent to the value of 8 hours of heart surgery work are obviously obsolete Bolshevik-power nonsense. Streets would be paved with dead bodies (as we occasionally still hear tell of in Red China) if such presumptions had had any merit. Marx moronically insisted that the "substance of value was labour," which, in his view, was not a commodity though democidal "labour power" was.

The many old, agrarian Labour Theories of Value (LTV) mistakenly argue the value of a commodity is only related to the labor needed to produce or obtain that commodity and not to other factors except as those other elements can also be regarded as "embodied labour". It's often associated with Marxian economics, but Locke's Theory is also a foundation to earlier classical economic theories from Adam Smith to David Ricardo. The impacts of revolutions, politics, modern automated industrialization, finite resource limits and scientific common sense all disprove the production side of LTV argument, but indisputably uphold the absolute certainty of the current labour-exchange-medium's "obtaining current value" side of it.

Even Adam Smith noted that at the core of the mercantile system (he largely opposed for populist reasons) was the "popular folly of confusing wealth with money," bullion was much the same as many other rarer (savings) commodities, most of which (diamonds he exampled) were superior to it.

John Locke's Labour Theory of Exchange-Value still transcends and resides stubbornly within both the Kleptocratic doctrines of pessimistic Gold-Primitive Malthusian Zero Sum Economics (Mercantilism, Colbertism) and the more altruistic Physiocratic Classical and (progressively more or less nonsensical) Neo-Classical Economics (from Smith and Riccardo to Marxism and Keynesianism) with regard to the concept of a standard, stable media of labour-exchange-value, necessary to conduct economic activities. We can all argue until we are blue faced about what, when, where, why or how what creates or destroys the values of things, even including wealth assets but the current and foreseeably ongoing value of a decent "money" should not rightfully belong among them.

Labour is the only (prime) "commodity" not (directly) sold by capitalists but rather sold by all workers, (including capitalists,) themselves, whose income tends to a minimum unless they are (better situated or) more talented. Even their surplus product is appropriated by the labours of the capitalists. Alan Freeman argues: "This is of course true of other commodities [than labours] also; but other commodities do not walk around the market disposing of their income on an equal basis with their owners or purchasers (nor do so using other mediums to exchange their worths). The cost of labour is determined independently of its capacity to make money for its (owner or) purchaser. This, and no other reason, is (how and) why profits exist.

Einstein argues similarly: "It is important to understand that even in theory the payment of the worker is not determined by the value of his product."

I prefer to avoid the notion of "labour power" due to it's democidal double-meaning and prefer the "prime commodity resource" description of it's engine-like, all motivational economic natures.




Well in the case of the Bitcoin-system securitized-token futures contract, security itself is the "encrypted crypto-collateral" that is the material substance of the digital trading contract it represents. I used the physical example of an encoded car key (of a chain of similar but all-different proprietary car keys) as a physical comparison to it to illustrate the different sense in which our(my) use of the term "security" is meant. Like serial numbers on Fed-Res-Co's private paper You-Owe-Us-Notes that they rent to us, they are a "security" feature that makes each debt to them unique. The only problem is the insecurity that many counterfeit debt notes could exist and be used with the same debt number on them.

Far better than that, Bitcoins each have an updated home "block" provenance "securitized codeplace" at their point of origin in the single encrypted digital chain that holds it's own records of it's negotiation, making even the use of any other attempted-duplicate impossible.

Once again we return to Locke and Smith's three distinctly separated concepts of the loose-term "value". These are differentiated as utilitarian-value, exchange value and intrinsic value. If we consider water and emeralds as examples, you can see where each can end up in any category depending entirely upon conditions of chance. In a long drought or desert water has all three wealths, emeralds only one. At a feast next to the fountains of a palace garden emeralds have all three wealths and water only maybe one.

In both cases above the Prime Resource of labour alone retains at least two if not all three of the natures of value, as it usually does in most all scenarios.

Gold has always been a "speculated commodity" before, during and since it has been a medium of labour exchange and is still today as a second-rate, bulk Medium of Savings. The entire pre-classical Mercantile Economic System was almost entirely based upon nations speculating about the future wealth and exchange value of their jealously hoarded gold. Before and during the Spanish/French/English empire's unfortunate blundering upon the New World, Euro-Asian-African Economics was entirely an exercise in Mercantile national gold-wealth hoarding for the purpose of speculation.

The hallmarks of Mercantilism are:

• That all raw materials found in a country be used in domestic manufacture, since finished goods have a higher value than raw materials.
  
  
• That a large, working population be encouraged.
  
  
• That all export of gold and silver be prohibited and all domestic money be kept in circulation.
  
  
• That all imports of foreign goods be discouraged as much as possible.
  
  
• That where certain imports are indispensable they be obtained at first hand, in exchange for other domestic goods instead of gold and silver.
  
  
• That as much as possible, imports be confined to raw materials that can be finished [in the home country].
  
  
• That opportunities be constantly sought for selling a country's surplus manufactures to foreigners, so far as necessary, for gold and silver.
  
  
• That no importation be allowed if such goods are sufficiently and suitably supplied at home.

Unfortunately all that Mercantile speculated gold hoarding ended up putting most all of it into the vaults of the ennobled Rothschild bankster Gold Pharaohs, and their Royal cronies. And, so much for the theory that a nation's Medium of Labour Exchange Currency is not related to nor the product of the value of it's exports.

By the 1800's the Rothschilds alone had already defrauded the rest of the planet of half of it's wealth by reserve-usury bankstering coupled to Tory Trotskyite Mercantilism, mostly profiting them in speculative hoards of gold holdings (as savings-wealth, not money).

Even up until America's "neo-Josephs" 1913 reconstruction/WWI war-communism debt sell-out debacle to the Rothschild/Morgan Gold Pharaohs at the ex-African slave importing depot of Jekyll Island and beyond it while the rented-receipt debt note "price"of gold was supposedly "fixed", the bankster speculators continued to hoard it, understanding it's limited deflationary-value (intrinsic) Medium of Savings relationship to economic growth, and leverage as a war-communism financing asset/security, that could also be employed fruitfully (for them) as "backing" for worthless tokens they could rent to those enslaved to them by it.

agentbluescreen,

I have struggled mightily through several of your posts, both here and elsewhere on this site, and I humbly request that you drop down your 165 IQ a few notches for us mere mortals. Your poetic prose seriously obscures your (presumably) intended topics of discourse, namely, "pyramid schemes", "slavery", "equivalence of  labor and value", "securitization", "stability of the value of money", "speculation", and on and on.

Maybe you could provide a "TL;DR" for each of your posts. It would be really helpful.

The problem I have is that you are right about many things, but wrong about others, and you mix them all together and then salt them with such arcane and charming phrases as "The Bilderberg Gold Pharaohs of Liechtenstein", "National Economic Labour-Exchange Currency Token", "BTC-securitized Future Derivative Contract", and "private Tory-Bilderberg Trotskyite Menshevik gang of wealthy boardroom(or stock market)-socialist Pharaohs". It's just damned hard to sort it all out and respond to any of it. But I'll try. First, what I agree with (I will try to dumb this down to 140 IQ levels):

1. Yes. Many commodities were experimented with as money over the centuries. What's your point again? They all became pyramid schemes? No.

2. Yes. Bitcoin is just a speculative oddity at the moment. It won't be money until it is relatively stable.

3. Fiat currency is bad. Duh. It allows some of us to eventually own everything (when enforced by the state). I hope we have the same definition of "fiat".

Now, my disagreements:

1. Gold was never a tool of the elites. It evolved as money slowly (and widely), thus making it very egalitarian. There is nothing wrong (and everything right) about a "physically" limited (but widely dispersed) money supply. In fact, the elites hated gold because it was honest and widely used money (society didn't need the state). They only enslave us when they "take away" (physically, psychologically, or legally) our ability to use it as money. They do this by forcing us to use their fiat money instead. The real enemy is our belief in political authority (but that is a very big and separate topic).

2. You make the same mistake that Marx made in his "Labor Theory of Value" by assuming some inherent relationship between labor and the value of money. The labor of one person or the labor of a nation cannot give money any inherent value. The value of money is completely subjective (just as is the value of anything). You may value $1000 a lot or a little. It all depends. It's the relative rank of your valuation of $1000 that matters. I once paid three or four of guys $400 to shovel two feet of snow off of my roof. At that moment I valued their 45 minutes of labor more than I valued my $400. That same group of guys River Dancing for my entertainment for 45 minutes would be worthless to me. Each is 45 minute of labor, but very different values (to me). All value is subjective. The only thing that "stabilizes" the economic value of anything is the historical record of what other people pay for things. When you want to buy or sell some used item on Ebay or though the local paper, you look to see what others are paying. But every transaction is independent and subjective. The stabilized value is a constantly changing historical aggregate. I agree that the "price" of money should not change much. But that is a consequence of its ever-widening use as money (as opposed to a speculated commodity) and millions of independent, voluntary, free-market transactions, and not some decreed system of fees to dampen speculation. Speculation will either level out over time or it won't. There is nothing we can (or should) do to control it.

3. You use "security" incorrectly. Security for a loan or contract is collateral not something that "guarantees and certifies provenance and unforgeability".

I discuss Bitcoin's and gold's money properties elsewhere, so I won't repeat myself here. I will just summarize by saying that gold was money once, but is unlikely to be so again. Bitcoin is not money now, and is unlikely to be so in the future. One major difference between them is that gold was "always there", whereas Bitcoin just popped into existence. This explains why gold was never a speculated commodity (while it was money), and why Bitcoin IS currently a speculated commodity. The only way for either of them to become money (again in the case of gold), is for fiat currencies (and states) to "get out of the way". That will require the dissolution of state power (and a major paradigm shift about the imaginary nature of political power) around the world. Maybe someday, but probably not in my lifetime.