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Comment by tedks | Hacker News Reader

>I'd file this headline under the category of "questions to which the answer is no".

Obviously if Bitcoin goes tits-up it will not be more stable than gold. There seems to be a non-trivial probability Bitcoin will go tits-up from shitty governance alone, but barring that it seems to me that Bitcoin has the potential to be far more stable than gold. Access to gold is dependent on a large amount of geopolitical factors that could all change at any time, as well as mineral extraction technology that is getting better all the time.

Extrapolating far enough, we'll never find an asteroid that's miraculously made almost entirely out of Bitcoin.

I'm curious as to whether your viewpoint is the same for all cryptocurrency or just Bitcoin.

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    we'll never find an asteroid that's miraculously
    made almost entirely out of Bitcoin

I think we're more likely to find a very fast way to compute sha256 hashes than a 10T+ gold asteroid.

As long as we can't preimage arbitrary hashes, the difficulty will adjust.

There are contingency plans for if a preimage becomes possible, and I suspect they'll move to a stronger hash before it's needed.

If you figure out how to hash 1000x more efficiently than other people and put that into practice without sharing your knowledge then you can cheaply get and maintain a hashpower supermajority.

(I'm not saying this is likely, just more likely than finding a large gold asteroid.)

People will notice soon enough, and they'll switch to a different algorithm. It takes time for the difficulty to go up, it only resets every 2016 blocks and is limited.

The characteristics from which gold derives it's value are basic facts of the universe.

The characteristic from which bitcoin derives it's value is a brand name. A 'bitcoin asteroid' can be found by simply copying the bitcoin source code and building a stronger brand.

> The characteristics from which gold derives it's value are basic facts of the universe.

Yeah, human ability to worship.

I was thinking more along the lines of resistance to corrosion, elemental arrangement of particles, etc.

Theoretically, human ability to worship should be transferable to any object of worship.

Those practical properties do not explain the special significance pure gold is given in world trade.

Frankly form where i am sitting that significance has virtually shit all to do with golds chemical properties, and all to do with history.

Trade among locals were likely settled via OIUs (carrots now for mutton later or whatever). But settlement between distant peoples were harder.

One option would be by weight, with the lowest common denominator being some food grain or other. And here gold may come in, from one of those properties you mentioned, resistance to corrosion. Makes for a durable weight measurement token.

But weight depends on purity. So in comes some ruler or other that puts a brand on a measure of gold to guarantee the purity.

Over time that guarantee then becomes so reliable that people starting using the tokens directly in exchange rather than bringing out the scales.

But it is the purity guarantee that in the end make gold more than a shiny metal. And using modern material production the same guarantee could just as well be placed on a piece of plastic or similar.

But still people go gaga over gold. AKA worship.

There are better alternative for those properties than Gold, however. Gold just happens to be the same color as the presumed Sun-god.

ohh..

Better go tell a large percentage of the world that they are wrong and they should all buy bitcoin then.

These are the only two options for you? Gold was created by God with all the properties to function as a medium for exchange (literally the belief of Islamic State), and what exactly, that Bitcoin is the One True Medium of Exchange and we should all melt the gold and use that?

Fortunately even Bitcoin enthusiasts are less gung-ho about their currency then some gold-nuts like Islamic State.

Source for Islamic State: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG7YXKE4x3w

Access to Bitcoin is dependent on a large amount of social and technological factors that could all change at any time, as well as altcoin extraction technology that is getting better all the time.

But the Internet is a distributed, nominally-decentralized system that's built to be resilient. We've seen how difficult it is to cut off Internet access to even regions within dictatorial nation-states. Compare that to gold supply/trade.

Compare that to gold supply/trade.

It would seem much easier and reassuring to slip some gold into your pocket if you're concerned about electrical or communication networks being severed. Also the part where the vast majority of people have no idea wtf bitcoin is or how to use it wouldn't be reassuring.

I don't understand this existential battle bitcoin wants to play with gold. They can co-exist, they're fundamentally different, one is not inherently superior, they are different.

Bitcoiners just like to play this fantasy of "Oh, if only bitcoin can replace this millennia entrenched system of which it has no rational basis to do so, I'd be so rich! Yippee!"

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