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Comment by xyzzy4747 | Hacker News Reader

You could use the same argument about gold which is worth over $10 trillion for an amount that fits into a swimming pool.

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People have absolutely been using gold investments to run scams on the financially unsophisticated, just like they have been with crypto: https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/goldline-execs-charged-fraud/...

Gold is ductile and a good conductor. Outside of it's shiny / jewelry uses it's actually a useful metal. Crypto only consumes energy as a product of it's existence.

And when the mining stops, all its value vanishes. Value stored on jelly. Bitcoin has a runaway implosion mechanism built in, and no floor on its price except 0.

I bet there's a lot of people who've bought bitcoin on leverage. Bitcoin may go to zero and it'll cost a lot of money on it's journey there.

If you owned all the gold in the world, you would have a hard time getting trillions of dollars out of it.

I agree, it's value is also speculative. I'm just making the point that it can be useful in it's own fundamental self.

It's not important enough to justify the valuation. I believe that was GP's argument.

Gold is a useful material for some use-cases, and people want it because it's pretty. Even if its intrinsic value is overshadowed by store-of-value value, BTC has nothing on that front.

Bitcoin can be transferred instantly across the world and the amounts verified by computers. Gold cannot.

Gold can be transferred between parties without leaving a public audit trail. Bitcoin cannot.

You can sort of transfer Bitcoin without an audit trail by giving someone the private keys to an account.

I guess, but there's no proof the sender has deleted their copies of the keys. You would need to immediately transfer the assets to another wallet, and until you did, the sender could rescind the transfer by moving the coins themselves.

Although meeting in person to physically transfer gold requires a similar amount of trust, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I fail to see how this is relevant at all, the point of parent was about intrinsic value.

There is intrinsic value in having a globally accessible Bitcoin network that has lots of liquidity.

>Bitcoin can be transferred instantly across the world and the amounts verified by computers. Gold cannot.

Which is a huge win for gold.

I'm still looking for all my apes that got stolen.

Although people aren't pouring money into gold with the hope of making big profit.

The folks at ZeroHedge would disagree

The folks at ZeroHedge have also predicted the financial apocalypse about seventeen times since 2008.

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