
Bitcoin Is the New 'Gold' - ca98am79
https://www.forbes.com/sites/panosmourdoukoutas/2017/08/30/bitcoin-is-the-new-gold/#777f494e3b36
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simias
Gold will probably still be valuable if society and its infrastructure
collapses. What's Bitcoin without the internet? Should something like WW3
occur, can we really assume that there'll still be a unified internet and that
it'll be working well enough to allow for bitcoin to work?

One could argue that you could use other ways to share the blockchain (radio
waves or even sharing physical storage) but how do you settle transactions
that way? You'd have to broadcast your transaction somehow, wait for a miner
to pick it up, mine it and then broadcast it to the rest of the network and
wait for other nodes to see and accept the new block and then build on top of
it. Sounds like a nightmare over high latency networks, you could wait for
days until you're sure that your transaction is accepted.

What if a certain region is cut off for a while (say, a country)? They'll make
transactions, mine them and then when they're reconnected to the rest of the
world their block "branch" is immediately overwritten by the outside chain
because it had a greater hash rate. Actually for most countries that wouldn't
even happen that way because they probably won't have the hash power required
to mine a single block in weeks, effectively making Bitcoin unusable.

I don't think Bitcoin would be a very practical currency for Mad Max. Better
invest in bottle caps.

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dongcarl
Progress is being made:
[https://blockstream.com/satellite/satellite/](https://blockstream.com/satellite/satellite/)

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0x4f3759df
Does this work for Bitcoin or just Bitcoin Cash?

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csuwldcat
Other way around: the sat system supports Bitcoin, _not_ BCash.

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Finnucane
This is the billion-dollar question: Will digital alchemists succeed where
their medieval ancestors failed? Or will you be holding digital Beanie Babies
somewhere down the line?

~~~
SirFatty
"Or will you be holding digital Beanie Babies somewhere down the line?"

Thanks for the chuckle... good way to start off the day!

~~~
Finnucane
Slightly more seriously, it's still not even clear if cryptocurrencies are
really functioning as investable assets--thing you buy and hold for
appreciation--or actual money--the unit of accounting for economic activity.
It will be hard to be both. During the gold-standard era, this was achieved by
government price controls on gold. That's basically what the 'standard' was, a
price control. And it turns out in practice, this is hard to maintain, which
is why it eventually failed.

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jbob2000
Gold is valuable because if the world economy collapses, there is still
intrinsic value in gold because it's shiny and pretty and I can hold it.

IF the world economy collapses, bitcoins are useless. The internet would fail,
people wouldn't have computers to use them any more. You can't do anything
with bitcoins if you don't have a huge network of computers to sustain the
system.

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0x4f3759df
If your country is conquered by war, then your fiat goes to zero, and your
gold is confiscated (or very difficult to transport). There are extremes where
Bitcoin goes to zero, but there are also extreme events where it has a lot of
value.

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jbob2000
If your country is conquered, you are ordered at gunpoint to open the safe
full of gold. The same thing would happen with bitcoins - you're ordered at
gunpoint to send them to the winning party.

To be honest, if your country is conquered, the last thing the winning party
wants is a couple of bits and bytes on a hard drive. What's far more valuable
is the natural resources, workforce, factories, etc.

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synicalx
I'd just like to point out that the price of gold doesn't vary by 2000% on a
daily basis, and there isn't a "Gold 2" or "Doge Gold".

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inthewoods
I think this is right, but Bitcoin is also showing the rather classic
bubble/irrational exuberance chart. That is to say, it may also be
outperforming gold because people are piling into, rather than it being a
reaction to uncertainty.

