Comment by anonporridge | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonporridge | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Isn't the same true of gold?

The gold supply is inflating at about the same rate as bitcoin right now, but has enough incoming cash flows to keep the priced propped up enough to maintain a $10 trillion market cap. Obviously some of that incoming cash flow is for actually generative industrial use cases, but it's a minority, https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-in.... The lion's share of incoming money flow is for jewelry, long term savings/investment, and central bank holdings, and you could argue that most of the jewelry use case only exists because it's a good store of value, since we can easily make jewelry that looks as pretty for much cheaper than the real thing.

So, since most of the cashflows into gold are just people holding long term with the expectation that there will still be people wanting to buy it for investment purposes in the future, and this scheme has worked incredibly well for 5000 years, why couldn't the same be true of bitcoin?

You need to pay the miners just to be able to transact with Bitcoin. Gold on the contrary, you can just hand it over to someone else.

It's way more expensive to store and transport gold than bitcoin, although it depends on the amount. You also have to price in the protection provided by local authorities that protect your property, in addition to your own security measures.

You need men with guns to move gold between banks, which themselves are protected by men with guns.

Bitcoin is unlikely to have a 5,000 year lifespan because unlike gold it can be obsoleted.

It’s likely after some number of years, most people will have lost their Bitcoins and there won’t be many left in circulation.

I think that would be a very amusing outcome. the rate of accidents can't be held at 0 so the supply of Bitcoin can only decrease in the long term.

However, is there any reason the network couldn't decide to, say, subdivide Satoshis even further to allow the remaining supply to become more tradeable? If the changes are slow enough over time it doesn't seem like there's a limit to how far that could go.

Gold has already been obsoleted by fiat money because it's too expensive and slow to transact with in the modern world.

Bitcoin won't necessarily have the same problem, because it's an information protocol. Protocols can be updated and improved. Even if the main chain ossifies and can't be improved, bitcoin tokens are already being moved to alternative blockchains (sidechains) via 2 way pegs.

!remindme 100 years

Reply on news.ycombinator.com