Hacker News Reader

Comment by zanny | Hacker News Reader

> There’s only a few parties that turn bitcoin (which teleports) into dollars (which buy stuff).

They are unnecessary if vendors directly accept bitcoin, at which point you can have your wallet, you can be connected to arbitrary nodes in the network, and you can spend the money from that wallet in transactions with any other wallet and verify against only ~8 nodes in the network to verify with reasonable certainty.

> It’s all fiat.

This is very true, and a lot of people ignore it. Props to the article for making a deal of it. Gold is not worth a thousandth its current market value if people didn't treat it as a scarce shiny valuable and instead treated it as a good conductor or flaky metal.

View on HN

> Gold is not worth a thousandth its current market value if people didn't treat it as a scarce shiny valuable and instead treated it as a good conductor or flaky metal.

That's a stretch. If it were not valuable monetarily, its price would be similar to other difficult-to-extract, heavy metals with a long list of unique properties, like Iridium or Rhenium, neither monetary, and both around $400 an ounce.

What's the global supply differential of Gold to Iridium?

I would also object to gold being difficult to extract.

Gold is relatively scarce, but about 3-10 times more common in the crust (by ppm on Wikipedia) than Iridium, Rhodium or Rhenium. Production of gold was 55 times higher than Rhenium. I don't know if this because of demand or difficulty of extraction. Rhenium is priced at $142/Troy ounce.

The $400 figure was the last time I checked--it's a very illiquid market and I remember publicly accessible prices being delayed by months. But rhenium is extracted as a molybdenum impurity, itself an impurity in copper. Most (90%) of it comes from Chile, and the price reflects supply and demand, really. I don't know what the supply elasticity is like, but I suppose suppliers could buy back old copper or molybdenum to purify it if the price warranted it. And because it's an exotic metal, none of the production is artisanal. Gold, on the other hand, has about 25% artisanal production, because mankind has been mining it for thousands of years and the extraction process is simple and well known.

"if vendors directly accept bitcoin"

Which is much, much less common.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com