The sudden fall in the price of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for the past weeks have indeed resulted in trending talks and news, both on social media and the investment market at large, of which according to the statistics given by tradingview(dot)com, it's price has fallen by $10000 for the past 10days, of which no investor will be happy for such a fall within a short period. And this has made Mark Bristow, the CEO of a gold mining company called "Barrick Gold" come up with his comparison to question Bitcoin as no store of value to gold. He said that while no one can print new gold into existence, people can still make cryptocurrencies.
And this is the main reason for me writing this article because thou, bitcoin been so volatile to fall and rise in price within a short period, it still has more advantages than gold, which I will be sharing with you all below.
1. Easily Portable:
Unlike gold, bitcoin can be transferred anywhere in the world in just a few minutes without anyone or any entity stopping it. But Gold by its nature physically needs someone to transport it to other cities, states, or countries e.t.c, of which it will take weeks or even a month before it will arrive at its destination.
2. Highly divisible:
Unlike gold, one bitcoin can be divided into 100 million smaller units called Satoshi, or Sats, but it's very hard to take your gold bar to the store and buy a cup of coffee with it because it can not be divided into smaller units.
3. Borderless, global and permissionless:
Unlike gold, bitcoin is borderless, because it is decentralized. It does not require any government, or companies to verify or approve it's transactions, and the government can't even if they wanted to. But if you want to send gold to another country, your country and the country receiving the gold could impose taxes or restrictions, which means it is been controlled by the government.
4. Easily verifiable:
Unlike gold, bitcoin is far more easily verifiable than gold. Anyone in the world can easily run a bitcoin node on a simple laptop to instantly verify their transactions and bitcoin hodlings, but as for gold, you have to have a specific set of skills and some expensive pieces of equipment to verify the authenticity of your gold, since it can easily be counterfeit.
5. Energy usage:
Unlike gold, bitcoin uses far less energy in the aggregate compared to gold. Because it is only bitcoin mining that requires a lot of energy usage and not bitcoin transactions. But Gold mining on the other hand is increasing its energy usage over time, as more new machinery is been created to mine more gold.
So in summary to all these, Bitcoin was created to give people more freedom than gold does, and to protect and store wealth across time and space.
Hence, we are now in the 21st century, and as such it's time we stop using rocks as money or a store of value. Because it once worked for the caveman, and the non-digital societies a long time ago, so it's high time we in this digital era start using a digital currency, and that's where bitcoin comes in.
So long live Bitcoin... Long live Bitcoin... Long live Bitcoin...
Thank you so much for finding out time to read this article of mine.
I remain your humbled Junior member...😃😃😃
I like examples 3 and 4 in your list, but I am not really sure the rest is a correct representation of the state of Bitcoin. From a government perspective untraceable money is a dangerous thing and is regularly associated with criminal activity (what else would you do with stolen funds than want to hide the source?), for that reason they will always want to be able to identify the owner and see movement between countries - much like the regular banking system. You're right about bitcoin being easily identifiable and that might be it's best attribute out of all that you've given - it is not prone to "chargebacks" which offers security similar to cash payments. I think you're reasoning behind the highly divisible is questionable, you can get tiny flecks of gold (micrograms) which could in theory be traded for cheaper goods - but I don't see people buying coffee with bitcoin on a large scale because it is rather inconvenient with variable fees. I read something the other day that said payment networks (visa, banks, etc.) use 20% of the power required for Bitcoin and gold extraction used something like 50% at the current levels, so your fifth example is wrong - there will be mining activity for some time to come so it can not be excluded and over many years it would have to be averaged for fair comparison.