Meanwhile, it's very difficult for them to stop use of metals no matter what the law is.
What attribute do you believe monetary metals possess that is not possessed by cryptocurrencies? From my understanding, crypto is the better bet. After all, we can hide an unlimited amount of it in secure fashion.The best bet in the long run is determined by whatever you believe makes up the base of Exter's pyramid:
I personally don't see bitcoin occupying the same bottom slot as monetary metals so it would have to be one higher on the same level as fiat. We live in a closed ecosystem and the blockchain for metals was created by two neutron stars colliding, so unless you can replicate that, it's not very easy to tamper with the metals blockchain. People spam the word "anti-fragile" for Bitcoin, but it's just not in the same category of security as requiring two neutron stars to alter. As you can see, Exter's pyramid is mostly a scale of real anti-fragility.
People like Bitcoin because they look at it as a free money tree of upward growth. Assuming the market cap had topped out on both metals and bitcoin and you were forced to go all-in on one, which one are you going to pick? The aggregate market will likely gravitate towards the most anti-fragile solution in that case if the upside is tapped out. The only reason people hold Bitcoin instead is because they believe it can have higher yield in the short term as a speculative instrument.
Since less than 1% of people own metals, and even less own Bitcoin, they both have a lot of speculative upside. It's all about measuring the risk and upside vs one another. Metals do have huge upside of probably around $5000-$20,000 for an ounce of gold and $166-$1333 for an ounce of silver in current purchasing power. This would be an average of a +10.6x for gold and +45x for silver. This means Bitcoin needs to have greater than a 10-45x upside ($8840 - $39,600 per coin) for you to consider it since the risk is higher.
To flatten out some of the noise here, let's assume partipants are 50/50 gold silver split and give you a +27.5x gain. In that case, Bitcoin would need to have upside potential of $24,200 per coin to be worth holding as a long term investment and not day trading (as of market prices today). Without Lightning network or a block size increase, I think Bitcoin might get stuck in the $10k-20k range. So you have these two variables in bitcoin throwing a big monkey wrench into what potential price can be.
Anyway, as you can see from my numbers, it is difficult to advocate a 100% all-in position on Bitcoin with 0 metals even if you are a crazed gambler seeking maximum yield. If you fall in that category of seeking max yield while still having some type of safety, you would likely be something like 50% metals 50% bitcoin at most, or even 70% metals 30% bitcoin due to the risks involved. (Notice I did say you need to be a crazed gambler to have 30-50% of your money in Bitcoin).
Gold is endless. You can mine the sh!t out of it! ... BTCiTcoin is NOT!
And there is the problem that gold has other properties and values for other industries. Meaning there will not be enough to make it usable for the casual currency debacle.
While on the other hand... BTCiTcoin multiplies by itself. And I will give you an example: "in the future when the price gets stable, the only way for bitcoin to go is up or sideways. And in a normal supermarket/wallmart ... one day you will have some prices and in the next day you will have lower prices, the store gets paid something that will rise in value while the prices drop every day, meaning the unstoppable rise of the value of money will make bitcoin a consumerism currency. Because each day prices drop and it encourages you to use/spend more!"
Its like 1 chocolate or a bar of candy will cost 10 times less the next year or in 2-3 years depending on inflation of bitcoin. And on the long term... in 500 years some planets will cost a few bitcons themselves, so basically you will mine all the gold you can want from those planets.
You are right about Bitcoin being limited. But we have yet to find out what percentage of the market cares about Bitcoin for actual use vs the percentage who see/use it for speculative investment purposes; Bitcoin's value will have an ultimate peak. Where that is nobody knows of course but perhaps it will become more apparent after the next halving or thereabouts.
