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Comment by beamatronic | Hacker News Reader

Why is gold being ignored then?

Because nothing has changed about gold, whereas bitcoin is new. Any investor putting 2% of their value into gold is already doing it. Investors putting 2% into BTC couldn’t do it before it existed, or matured to where it is now.

It's not. The productive (e.g. industrial or jewelry) utility of gold is about USD $80 per ounce. But the price is at over $1200 per ounce. In effect investors haven't just not been ignoring gold, they've been buying it at such a rate as to pull it away from its intrinsic uses.

You can't transfer gold at will across the world. Although BTC is claimed to be a "store of value", it can also be transferred around fairly easily (with very little friction). It can also be exchanged for many different currencies.

You either have to hold gold, which is dangerous and again contingent on avoiding nation-state failure risk, or you have to trust someone else to hold gold, which is perhaps as risky but the risks have a different profile.

A) How is holding gold contingent on avoiding nation-state failure risk, or at least how is the relevant risk to gold as opposed to say your person?

B) It's pellucidly clear that holding bitcoin is dangerous in the same way that holding gold is -- i.e. it can be stolen. In fact, it looks like the carrying costs may actually be higher.

A) If your nation state fails and you have to flee the country, how are you going to take your gold with you? That's the real risk, not local vault security.

B) You can take your bitcoin, encrypt it, and put it anywhere on the Internet in plain sight, and then hold the encryption key in your pocket, or in your head. Totally safe, especially against the real threat, border security. Bitcoin is far easier to physically secure than gold is. What's difficult is securing it in a manner that also makes it easy to do business with it.

If your nation state fails and you die in the resulting chaos what good will the encryption key in your head do anyone? Saying that bitcoin is a better gold because it solves the nation-state failure risk is missing the forest for the bacteria in the ants crawling on the leaves of the trees.

> You can take your bitcoin ...

Perhaps you could, but people generally don't. So in terms of actual risk and carrying costs and how that relates to potential market cap, your foolproof system is rather irrelevant.

You seem to be dealing in absurd hypotheticals here. In most countries in the world, having your nation state fail on you is a very real risk. It doesn't fail all at once, so it's something you can plan for. Having wealth outside of the banking and financial sectors that's not also in physical form is something that's very valuable for this purpose.

Bitcoin has the same issue as gold in that regard: it's not that easy to hold it securely both from third party attackers and from your own stupidity. You can encrypt everything behind a password, but what if you forget that password? So you write it down somewhere, but then what if this somewhere is stolen? How do you handle sudden death, or loss of memory? You can also leave all your crypto currencies to a third party, but do you really trust that third party?

These problems are mostly solved for "us", on hacker news. You might even say that it's easy to solve. Yet the status quo for anything digital around me is "hello123" as a password, and panic when having to re-enter the gmail password on that new iDevice because it has long been forgotten and neither "hello123" nor "hello321" worked.

They likely also have gold, but they already bought it long ago.

Gold can't be used in the digital space.

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