Comment by alwillis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alwillis | Hacker News Reader

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Here's the short version:

Gold's market cap is about $10 trillion.

Bitcoin is like digital gold—scarce, hard money not tied to a government. It's better than gold in that it's easily divisible (1 satoshi is 1/100,000,000 of a bitcoin), easy to transport, etc.

Bitcoin is becoming a global store of value; its market cap is about $350 billion. All fiat currencies except the dollar and the pound sterling has gone to zero at one time or another.

The more fiat is inflated in an unstable world, the more it replaces gold as a safe haven, store of value.

Last I heard bitcoin was not technically able to be used as a payment processor subsitutes.

It can be used for paying for things but it makes more sense to use fiat for daily expenses and save bitcoin. Why would I spend something that will be worth a lot more 5 years from now, while the fiat currency in my pocket loses value every week?

Bitcoin is already becoming the standard for large, irreversible transactions, where it excels [1].

[1] A link showing a $165,000,000 bitcoin transaction that cost about a $1.20—https://twitter.com/coinbeastmedia/status/133612299565221888...

> Why would I spend something that will be worth a lot more 5 years from now, while the fiat currency in my pocket loses value every week?

Everything is predicated on it going up in value. If it always goes up why would anyone ever sell? And if everyone is just HODL, what use is bitcoin? It seems enough to strangle itself.

Eventually it won't go up anymore either due to market penetration or a better store of value came along. The current long term holders believe that 1. It's far from market penetration (just look at the skeptical comments here) and 2. It has sufficient network effects and momentum to over come competing stores of value.

It's perfectly scarce and rapidly trending toward 0 inflation. This is one of the key arguments for why it's ultimately a better store of value than gold, which is abundant in the context of the solar system.

I'm curious about what you mean by a possible better store of value. To me, that sounds like saying we can go colder than 0 kelvin.

Solar system? You are thinking ahead. But then you need to think quantum computing too!

The only saviour is highly valued quantum proof forks of BTC, preserving the original txns

Even still on Earth, we're mining ~2% more gold annually. More gold in absolute terms is being mined than any other time in human history.

You just answered the quantum question yourself. We can upgrade the bitcoin protocol with quantum resistant cryptography. I very much doubt it would be a contentious fork. No need to bootstrap an entirely new value network.

The good thing about gold is if/when people decide its no longer a good store of value, you can still use it, for jewellery or connectors etc. BTC is just goes poof.

This is actually a pro for bitcoin. It's not useful as anything other than a store of value.

If we collectively decide to switch to bitcoin as our store of value network, and retire gold and silver from that use case, then we free up all the gold stored in vaults collecting dust as a value store to do more useful work that it's uniquely capable of, like being used in electronics or dental work.

A lot of these use cases now aren't economically viable because the market value of gold is inflated due to being overloaded with the store of value use case.

Is it a trend that the quality of comments about BTC on HN has increased drastically? It's about 50/50 of the good/bad ratio now, whereas 1-2 years ago, I'd say it was easily 10/90.

Tell me mister gxon, are you a good representation of the HN crowd, or is it just Bitcoiners have piled on this article for some reason?

> I'm curious about what you mean by a possible better store of value. To me, that sounds like saying we can go colder than 0 kelvin.

Maybe better store of value isn't the wrong choice of words, but better in terms of having the same store of value properties + more resistant to attack, better privacy, easier to secure, easier to use, scalable etc.

There are projects trying to be better than bitcoin on technical fronts, but it needs to be an order of magnitude better to offset the current moment and network effects at this point, unless a real attack on the bitcoin network threatens its security.

If it always goes up why would anyone ever sell?

There will come a time when even the most hardcore hodler will have to sell to pay for something. Like buying a house…

> Bitcoin is already becoming the standard for large, irreversible transactions, where it excels

A single transaction is not evidence of bitcoin "becoming the standard."

A single transaction is not evidence of bitcoin "becoming the standard."

There were 9,064,548 Bitcoin transactions in the last 30 days [1]. There are many relatively large transactions that take place everyday.

[1] https://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/dashboard/

Yes, people buy and sell Bitcoin. That has nothing to do with the idea that people are using Bitcoin to transact business, let alone that it’s becoming the standard way to do so.

Bitcoin transaction are so far only becoming the standard for people who want to gamble.

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