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Comment by amin | Hacker News Reader

There are many cryptocurrencies who are nearly identical to Bitcoin, except that most don't have the widespread fame and support. In 2019 alone, 90,000 new crypto-currencies were created. Yes, there will only be 21 million bitcoins, but there are already countless, nearly an infite amount of copycat coins.

This is not the case with gold.

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Comparing all those ERC20 tokens to Bitcoin is like comparing a Wix website to Google / Facebook

How about non ERC20 token? So a WIX website isn't as legitimate as Google/FB? Who is this arbiter of legitimacy?

Is this a joke? Show me a Wix website with the features and scalability of the giants.

The users, it’s the same network effect that prevents me from making a Facebook clone and taking market share.

There are plenty of other metals or “creations” like time pieces.

There is silver, and platinum, and tungsten, etc. etc. It’s the same thing just in a physical format.

There are an infinite supply of magical numbers. There are a limited supply of precious and rare metals easily minable on earth.

E.g. The price of copper has been going up over the past century (adjusted for inflation)

If you want to mine more magic numbers just add another digit to the search space and you'll easily have another 10 times more numbers.

But most coins have a limit . Btc is 21 million it's not infinite

Wait, that's fungible right?

* BTC forks (how many have there been, cause I forget.)

* If the BTC community wanted it to change, they could.

* The 100 other cryptocurrencies created every day.

There are good reasons why gold and silver became the main medium of exchange for thousands of years. Most other metals failed imported criteria to make them as useful for this purpose.

Just like Bitcoin. Your bias/ignorance is keeping you from understanding that all these things apply to BTC. I highly suggest taking a step back and reflecting on this more objectively.

> This is not the case with gold.

Silver, platinum, palladium, rhodium, copper...

Just as people have generally centered around gold, people have so far generally centered on Bitcoin. There's a great deal of other metals and a great deal of other cryptocurrencies, but if nobody really cares about them, then they are not relevant to the conversation.

Much like Bitcoin gold has virtually no uses (outside of being worth money)

Gold has actual use. At minimum, gold is worth the value of it's conductivity properties, or of it's high malleability, high density, low reactivity and low toxicity, or it's pretty looks. Bitcoin has none of those going for it except maybe the looks (to anyone who has a copy of the "pretty" Blockchain)

You can't make new rare elements out of thin air though.

Sure you can. Create a new chemical and call it a "rare substance". It will probably get about as little traction as the long tail of 99% of the cryptocurrencies out there.

If you had enough energy and the right equipment/process you could "alchemize" gold or any other element out of Oxygen/Carbon/Nitrogen.

> palladium, rhodium

Sidenote: Both of them have surpassed gold in terms of pricing for a while recently. Not every cryptocurrency is valuable, but some can be if they can fill a gap like palladium and rhodium, that were mostly useless metals 100 years ago.

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