1) Bitcoin is more convenient to store and transfer: it's digital. You can literally use your brain as a Bitcoin wallet.
2) The supply of gold is less predictable. For instance, just last month, China announced the discovery of the world's largest known gold deposit, estimated to be worth over $80 billion.
To be clear, $80 billion is not earth-shattering in the gold market. Lots of gold exists in the world but is too expensive to mine. I don't remember how expensive but I think it is at least half of the current price. The supply of gold grows at a very slow rate of at most 2% per year. It is getting harder to mine all the time. Demand and futures market manipulation matter far more to gold than its small supply. All the world's gold that was ever mined could fit in roughly two Olympic size swimming pools.
> 1) Bitcoin is more convenient to […] transfer: […].
As some phishing victims have learned to their peril. Of course BTC transfers are non-reversible / non-refundable, with no means of redress (unlike a bank transfer).
Precisely. Bitcoin operates as a bearer asset, much like physical gold or cash - once it's gone, it's gone. For those who need payment reversibility or dispute resolution, a payment layer built on top of Bitcoin is required. For example, a BTC-denominated bank account or credit card could theoretically provide these features, though I'm not sure if such options already exist.
I was referring to the fact that you can memorize your seed phrase. If the seed is not recorded anywhere, the Bitcoins can be thought of as being held only in the mind of the owner.
The supply of discovered gold and the supply of gold extracted from mines (and recovered from other sources) aren’t the same, and one is more predictable. Which one has a greater impact on the price….
> Gold is 'first place' and has been a symbol of value for most of our recorded history.
Actually it has not. Not in Mesoamerican civilizations (Aztec, Mayans). Also not for the Chinese, who used silver for currency (and gold for ceremonial purposes). Around the Mediterranean, gold became a currency 'only' around 500BC with the Lydians—which is a very long time after the first economic records we have, which take back to Ur III, the Babylonians (Hammurabi), Ancient Egypt.
And when it was used, there were periods of economic stagnation due to its fixed supply:
See the links in the post about the problems with deflationary currencies. See also the links of events that were made worse by finite/deflationary currencies; reposting:
It also cannot be hacked or tracked like Bitcoin. It works offline and can even survive longer than whole countries. The biggest problems are risk of theft and high taxation.
Bitcoin was supposed to be private and secure, so it more or less failed its mission. It is only presently easier to trade because of various gimmicks to warm people up to the idea of accepting it. Gold on the other hand has a long history of being a currency. Everyone in the world knows it is valuable, even if they don't know how much. The fact Bitcoin wildly swings around in value and requires special computer access and sometimes hardware makes it harder to transact with. If you don't care about privacy and security, and want ease of use, you would be far better served by a credit card than a Bitcoin wallet. And if you do care about those three things, gold is better. The only thing I can say positive about Bitcoin is that it is easier to carry across borders than gold. That plus the modicum of privacy it offers might make it ok for some. As for me, I don't think I could privately accumulate enough Bitcoin for that to be a real benefit to me.
Edit: I hit the limit for now so here's a reply:
>Was it supposed to be [private]? A currency with a complete ledger of transactions available for view by anyone in the p2p network is hardly secure by design
It was intended to be secure and private. That is, people can't steal your Bitcoin (theoretically) and the public ledger gives you some potential strategy if you did want to establish a reputation while dealing with anonymous people. Someone could also deal with you without ever knowing your identity, which makes it private. It would be fairly hard to identify Bitcoin users if their wallets were never linked to their identities, e.g. through an exchange. I don't know how other cryptocurrencies do their ledgers but I assume you are limited to querying the network about specific transactions instead of having access to it all. It could be done by having public yet encrypted transaction records as well maybe. Idk, cryptocurrency never appealed to me. I remember thinking my classmates were insane for buying Bitcoin at $70. The price movement we've seen feels like some insiders using it to embezzle money from reputable institutions who have been sold on the hype. We're in real trouble if the government starts buying it. We will be robbed blind.
Was it supposed to be? A currency with a complete ledger of transactions available for view by anyone in the p2p network is hardly secure by design.
Edit: thanks for the reply. In that sense that you are able to be only identified by a wallet address, that makes sense. I guess I meant that, unlike privacy-focused coins like Monero, there is a way to see who sent what to who (even if who is just an address) and to develop surveillance based on this.
