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Comment by akira2501 | Hacker News Reader

Gold is rare. Gold is used for things. You can argue about the _scale_ of the value, and whether or not current market conditions truly reflect the value of an ounce of gold, but that does not remove the fact that it is an actual resource, limited in availability and has practical uses in and of itself.

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Doesn't the design of Bitcoin ensure limited availability as well?

Sure, but it still has no utility on it's own. Interesting point though, because it brings up a weakness of bitcoin in general; the same weakness that got us off the gold standard in the first place.

Your bank account has no utility on its own. So what? It's still valuable.

Bitcoin is valuable because of its properties, and that's why people are willing to pay more than $1,000 for each.

Not really. You can create an infinite number of cryptocoin currencies. Look at the proliferation of them.

Gold is not rare, it's a huge lie. I just checked, it's mined at 2,500 tons per year. That's just the discovered gold, and only on our planet. There are enormous quantities of gold in the universe. Same goes for many other things that are marketed "rare" - silver, diamonds, other gems.

You don't have a clue what you're talking about. Gold is extremely rare, making up under 1 part per billion of the earth's crust. Only 6 elements (ruthenium, palladium, rhenium, iridium, and rhodium) are rarer.

Over 1 billion tons of iron are mined each year, to put your figure in comparison.

To say that gold is not rare is not just misleading but a bald-faced lie.

It's rare per pound, but it's not limited in any real sense like bitcoin. Gold is mined to the point where 2% of it is added to the traded/stored amounts. It's pretty much guaranteed to lose value.

And then there's this coming soon:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining

> Only 6 elements (ruthenium, palladium, rhenium, iridium, and rhodium) are rarer.

I think you forgot to count all the truly rare elements on the periodic table past number 90. You know, the ones that decay in hours, minutes, seconds or microsends.

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