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Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

You can't print gold, and BTC is appreciating much faster than gold (or any commodity or store of value or even other cryptocurrencies).

It is not appreciating because fiat money is being devalued. That can account for -- at max -- 20% of the price increase.

It's appreciating because of speculation.

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> You can't print gold

You can 10x the world gold supply by capturing a single medium-sized metallic asteroid.

You also can't send gold over the internet or store it in a private key. Given that Bitcoin is otherwise quite similar, mutatis mutandis, it's not unreasonable to imagine that Bitcoin might displace gold to some degree as a reserve asset.

People also lose bitcoins, I assume easier than losing physical currency or a bank account.

One of the ways I don't feel bad about not making millions in BTC even though I was aware of it long ago is the absolute certainty that I would have simply lost the paper wallet, had a hard-drive failure, etc, etc. There is just no way I would have held onto my keys for the 7 years that I was aware of it. I imagine that the breakage here for early investors is probably pretty high. I never did cash out on my dogecoin...

It’s not impossible to make copies of and secure private keys if you have a plan. (But even if you had bought some and preserved it, would you have had the tenacity/foresight to hold onto the BTC for 7+ years?)

> It’s not impossible to make copies of and secure private keys if you have a plan

I was 100% discussing my scenario. I would absolutely not have enacted a careful plan with multiple fall-backs. Which is it's own kind of self-indictment tbh, but one that I am at peace with. :D

Also, this holds for 99.99% of the populous. Even hardware wallets aren't a great solution and there you're paying a hundred dollars or so just to get one.

Shovels in a gold rush.

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