Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 651. (Read 2032266 times)

Gold is an element created in super novas not on this planet so to some extent its total amount is limited but yea price could crash from big supply but I think its fairly regular and been proven for a while.

More then asteroids we have vast amounts of gold on this planet.   They are locked into the earth core as molten lava though, we arent going to get it easily seems like but maybe one day.   Some kind of continual supply is inevitable, it seems to be in line with global population increase though

My point about finding gold is that this is a valued asset usable by anyone.   Even the 'savages' can find a shiny rock and access this form of currency.    Why does this matter to you and me stting here in comfort, its that we all start off in the world as nobody with nothing not even able to talk.   We must pick up the tools and make our way in the world and gradually gain the benefit of knowledge and wealth created by our ancestors.  It seems to me this is a vital part overlooked that gold is so incredibly accessible by a person with absolutely nothing in the world, they can just find it.  

Bitcoin lacks this, its elitest perhaps.  Increasingly its market involvement is being constricted to just those who can design ASIC circuit boards or those who can pay them for their knowledge.   It seems this could be a flaw that if you really want to build something great, you must allow the great unwashed masses of the world to be able pick up their tools and learn how to be involved in your system of worth and we cant exclude them.  Increasingly we only want people to be btc consumers and my arguement with capitalism truely applied is that the worth is always with the people not the elite.

Just a point and I might be wrong but its another major difference between gold and bitcoin and I think its an ongoing dynamic as bitcoin becomes more difficult and gold remains random in its distribution to even just a small part this makes it more a peoples currency.
  Which is more likely to survive long term and increase in value even

yep, i think this should kick off the next Bitcoin rally coming out of the contracting low volatile flag.

gold has failed us.

i know we're coming at this from different angles so let me just present the counterview.

with all the ATM's, localbitcoins, and Circle and Coinbase, it seems pretty easy to get Bitcoin.  who cares about getting it thru the protocol?  gold, not so easy.  why would i travel to Zimbabwe to pick gold dust out of a stream?  yeah, i could buy it from my local dealer.  i think accessibility to either is a worthless argument as they both seem pretty easy to get. 

but, any found gold increases the supply on the market driving down its price.  why would you want that?  now, we're looking at ocean mining and asteroid mining as well.  at least with Bitcoin, the amounts can only go down thus preserving market price.

Yea hehe not sure if your serious but Im talking with respect to the total supply or large amounts.  I know bitcoin is easy to buy in theory but I can also buy gold from ebay with buy it now too, I guess not instant delivery but a nearby pawn shop would also deal me from my credit card.

Really Im talking about from the source.  The gold picked up off the ground in gold rush was no small amount, it was released freely to many different people.    It created mass migration but the actual 'mining' as such was easy.  
Even today, say 1% of gold might be easy.  Not in one place but all over the planet some amount of gold is just found under a rock undiscovered, this easy gold adds up to quite alot across the planet and its given freely.

This does not apply to bitcoin, you cant get free bitcoin from the source easily.   Whats the odds of an average person on the street solving a blockchain, its not within a million percent close to 1% even.   Im just wondering if that is a flaw that will stop btc propagating as far as gold has across all cultures

Good news for them because that shiny metal in the long term is not going to be worth much.
Good news for us in the short term as it accelerates the inflatability of fiat.

i dont get it. like scotland rejecting their independence.

it's way easier to get Bitcoin than an ounce of gold.  just log into Circle, input CC info and buy instantly.

yeah, that was lame.  what do you expect?  he's reading Tim Swanson.

Yea I always wonder what is the point to bitcoin difficulty.   Surely its not a self assembled mountain ready for the fresh ascent of miners every day in order to claim a prize.  It must make the protocol more secure right, some kind of offshoot benefit would be good to hear.   Not just we needed to stop it being easy to solve.   I mean if it werent for high diff we could process transactions in 1 minute or less instead maybe though I realise this makes cohesion of the chain harder

Not quite true, look up the California gold rush.   When western settlers first arrived they found gold 'pebbles' on the floor, literally. It had not been moved since the ice age since the native americans in that area placed little value on accumulating it.
Its still the case to a small extent that gold is just found on the surface not hard mined out of the rock.    You could argue about smelting or purity but a gold nugget found can just be roughly as it is if people wanted to and in some case nuggets are left as is

In comparison there is no easy bitcoin that I know of, perhaps we'd have greater worldwide involvement if some of those billion people could just get lucky and get some bitcoin.   I know in theory a block can be solved easily but its not a case of picking it off the ground is it.   I dont have a ASIC setup randomly trying, its almost pointless on old devices and worse then the lottery.
I reckon its a serious point that the common people need some access to new bitcoin not just those designing asic.   In Zimbabwe during their currency collapse people dug gold out of the river banks, hard work but possible with bare hands almost and it saved them from starvation in some cases.   Because of this accessibility gold is unlikely to ever be forgotten by the masses

the rejection is in.  gold collapsing:

Swiss Reject Save Our Swiss Gold Referendum

https://smaulgld.com/switzerland-reject-save-our-swiss-gold-initiative/

prior to SC's, i was vocal against CP and other Bitcoin 2.0 platforms as well as other altcoins.  but that was only b/c i see all these things converging to Bitcoin in the end as the one money that will rule all and b/c the asset enabling platforms are premature.

but now i perceive SC's as the greater existential threat b/c it involves Blockstream trying to enable a source code change that will enable their own business model.  not only do i consider that unfair, i consider it a threat to Bitcoin as Money as i've beaten to death.  i don't want to see intra-protocol speculation built into Bitcoin itself effectively converting it into a WoW trading platform.

given all that, CP and the others become merely competitors willing to compete with Bitcoin on a level playing field which i am all for.  they may even push Bitcoin to become better which is also good.  the 2500 BTC proof of burn was interesting with XCP coming out the other end into the CP platform.  i listened to one LTB podcast of the core dev who sounded intelligent.  Patrick Burns is involved whom i admire.  i wish him well altho i still think these alternative asset platforms are way too premature.

there is no way, imo, that these things can get going w/o Bitcoin establishing itself on the worldwide stage as a bonafide, apolitical, secure, time tested, and generally accepted form of money first and foremost.  all those other assets and altcoins are Bitcoin derivatives at best.  we need to grow the market cap orders of magnitude greater in size and bully our way onto the Forex exchanges and into the gold/silver markets.  that takes years and patience.  we need outsiders to have to "buy in" to BTC on MC to participate.  but the great thing is, we are doing it.  it's happening.  but for this to continue, we need to avoid politicizing and manipulating the source code rules so that outsiders can be confident they are not buying into another FedStream system.  Bitcoin has evolved to a public good and NO ONE should be allowed to manipulate it except for purposes of improving its core function as MONEY.

Quite fitting, your GIF rebuttal has as much substance as fiat.

It does look pretty though... weeee!

Good read, lays it out plain and simple, it is indeed checkmate!

Sound money ( gold and bitcoin included ) WILL break up to it's real price in the future.

i highly recommend this text containing best of geopolitical porn to make warm feelings in the tommies for all the gold bugs out there..

http://www.gold-eagle.com/article/grandmaster-putins-golden-trap

Ugh. No. David. Bad.

I think you're looking at this the wrong way.  He's saying this is a positive for Bitcoin, as it reveals Bitcoin's efficiency over something physical like gold.  I don't think he's trying to imply that this is a threat to Bitcoin's scarcity. 

Bitcoin is a more pure form of money than gold. 

If is for children and shitcoins. A fallacious argument and failed attempt at philosophy. If I could find an asteroid made of gold and catch it with a very big net I could crash the gold market.

This gold mining argument still seems a bit silly and perhaps circular to me. We use gold (a rare and difficult-to-mine substance) for the same reason we need Bitcoin mining: to replace fragile trust. If everyone were trustworthy, we could use shiny pebbles instead of gold coins. No resources would be needed to "mine" pebbles, you just pick them up off the ground. Everyone would be trusted not to pick up pebbles he didn't deserve, and only obtain them through trade or in some other socially approved manner (perhaps as a form of "guaranteed minimum income", every person would be allowed to pick up one pebble per day.

Right, bitcoin mining is needed to secure the ledger and create consensus on the ordering of transactions.  Thus the resources consumed in the process are not "wasted" in the same sense they are with gold mining. Smooth, you're one of the best here with semantics and logic, and I'm sure you'll find something wrong with my arguments, but I think David Andolfatto's (St. Louis Fed VP) has made some important insights into bitcoin and the nature of money (and that I'm not clearly explaining my point of view).  

My original post on this topic was in defence of his critique of Willem Buiter's (Citibank Chief Economist) analogy between gold and bitcoin.


Readers here might be quick to correct David: "of course, bitcoins are costly to produce.  Satoshi said that the cost to produce them would tend to approach their market value…"  He half explains this later:


And he's right: if one had control over the protocol, one could instantly and costlessly create as many bitcoins as one wanted…and issue a favourable amount to one's friends and to one's self!!  Andolfatto argues that "evil is the root of all money," or more accurately, that money is necessary because trust and information is not perfect.  So what would happen "if a benevolent and omniscient God" had control of the protocol"? Well then this God could issue the bitcoins to the population of the world in a way the results in the optimal distribution to achieve some "best happiness" or some such notion as deemed appropriate by His Benevolence.  In such a case, the cost to produce each bitcoin would be identically zero (and the resulting distribution of wealth would be equal to or better than what will actually play out over the next decade).

When viewed through this lens, bitcoins are costless to produce.  The resources consumed by the miners are not spent on the bitcoins themselves, but rather on the fact-finding mission to determine how these entries in our global ledger should best be distributed across the world's population².  And, since we unfortunately don't have access to a benevolent and omniscient God to help us fill in the blanks¹, this fact-finding mission plays out as bitcoin's proof-of-work mining competition.  

So, the resources consumed during bitcoin mining solve an informational and trust problem only.  If "evilness"=0 and if information was perfect, then the cost to produce bitcoins would be zero.  On the other hand, the production of gold is a physical problem and its cost and environmental impact would always be significant and would not depend (to a great extent) on information or on trust.

TL/DR: bitcoin > gold.

¹I'd argue that the fiat experiment that began at Bretton Woods was a result of conviction that we could emulate the decisions my hypothetical "benevolent of omniscient God."  A conviction that I believe is fading away.  But the fiat experiment was at least half right: money doesn't have to be costly to produce (like gold is), provided information and trust is perfect (it's just that we aren't trustworthy and perfect information is not possible).  

²In the post-distribution stage of bitcoin, mining remains non-wasteful.  If "evilness"=0, then nobody attempts to double spend or attack the network.  In such a world, there's no need for mining, because everyone is honest and nodes can hold hands and take turns publishing blocks.  So in a utopian world, no resources are required to verify transactions.  In the real world, resources are consumed to the extent that "evilness" exists.  Once again, the resources are consumed to solve a problem of information and trust, not to perform some physical action.  We must waste a certain amount of resources simply to dis-incentivize economic agents from acting maliciously.