What is up with the gold parity and Gox ATH and so?
Just asking.
Gox ATH was an imaginary ceiling, and breaking it is closure. Any holder of bitcoin EVER is now in the green.
Now 1 arbitrary unit of account (a BTC), in a decentralized protocol thought up and developed from nothing more than an idea, is worth more than an oz of GOLD... In <10 years.
Naysayers have never been grasping at straws like now.
I have been thinking/reading about this lately. My conclusion is that gold is nothing more than a vanity asset, and will never reach the "promise land" while bitcoin can. Here are the things to consider why i have reached this conclusion:
1. Potential for increased adoption for Store of value:
Gold was and is a store of value for thousands of years. That sound like a plus, but, actually that shows gold has no 100 millions of future adopters ahead of it. Everyone knows gold, especially governments want to hoard it (which should raise a red flag, it means they think/will act on to control it). Young people (20-40), apart from India and similar low economic wealth societies, has no interest in hoarding gold.
Bitcoin - as for any other technological adaptation cycle shows us - has no upper limit on the number of potential investors, 99.99% of the population has still no clue what is it, also, it can adapt to any human behavior, unlike gold, which has fixed, "intrinsic" properties (and hence fixed, unsolvable limitations, like weight, space, which lead to fractional paper gold reserves already, unlike bitcoin, where everyone can instantly proof, that his bitcoin exists, and only he has control over it).
2. Liquidity and actual economic activity:
Gold has no practical economic use (actually, the fact that it can be used in electronics, medicine and art makes it less "money")
in everyday life. No gold coin can realistically be used to pay for goods/services in a "Monday morning coffee" situation. The only way to release the economic value from gold holdings is to trade it - with much hassle, limited trading hours, extremely limited and actual physical presence in a gold "pawn shop" - for a more liquid asset, like USD or *cough* bitcoin. While this ain't that such a big deal for long time holders, still, compared to "digital gold", the premium for physicality is huge in comparison.
Bitcoin is a different animal, a perfect embodiment of the Informational Age sentiment, waaay more liquid in real life market events - by that i mean: i can actually use my bitcoins for beer, food, groceries, etc., right now(!), while my gold bars can not be used directly for any payment, or transferred through the globe, 0-24h. Bitcoin leaves gold in the dustbin of history regarding actual economic activity, and, you can not upgrade the "features" of gold, unlike bitcoin's.
TLDR; for an investor, there is no logical reason based on the above, to postulate a 10x value increase in 5 years for gold, while there are many reasons to do it for bitcoin. Hence, as a long term store of value, "digital gold" beats old school gold, and the opportunity cost of holding one of them is in an obvious non equilibrium in favor of bitcoin, which will start a self generating cycle of gold investment ---> bitcoin investment.