"Gold 2.0" is a Pathetically Low Bar

avatar

lowbar.jpg

Let's get right down to the point.

Calling Bitcoin "gold 2.0" is an insult. It's like calling artificial intelligence "Calculator 2.0" or calling a smartphone "Pager 2.0". It is a ridiculous nothing-statement forged by people trying to explain a very complicated technology to the masses, and the analogy falls flat on its face over and over again and no one seems to question it; Least of all Bitcoin maximalists.

What are the properties of gold?

Gold has already failed miserably as a currency. It's deflationary nature ensures that it will not allow for economic growth or the ability to alter value creation in a healthy way. The only way to get more is to mine it, and mining is a quite expensive and a risky business. Those who get it, tend to horde it, and this hurts money velocity and causes economic stagnation.

Likewise, Bitcoin will also fail as a currency because of its inherent deflationary nature (which is even more deflationary than gold; and out of shear delusion and greed this is celebrated). But then again I'm not here to talk about how Bitcoin and gold are similar, am I? You "mine" it using energy/hardware and it's deflationary, the similarities end there.

peterschiffgoldbitcoin.png

What was gold supposed to be?

It was supposed to be the ultimate hedge against inflation.
The ultimate store of value.
How'd we do?

image.png

Meh, not terrible!

We can see that gold has retained most of its value in the past 40 years, but it is also extremely volatile and is not inversely correlated with the dollar like it should be.

image.png

When we zoom out and try to chart gold vs USD we can see pretty clearly that there are only a few good exit points for gold over decades past. Most of the time gold seems to be chronically undervalued with sporadic pumps that will bring it back to life. The derivatives market has done a great job of artificially manipulating this asset and keeping the value proposition suppressed.

Returning back to the gold standard would crash the economy instantly. We are way past the point of no return on that front. Currency can not be backed by gold because gold is deflationary, and fiat and all of the infrastructure we've built upon it depend on inflation and growth. Sorry gold bugs, not gonna happen. Sorry Bitcoin maximalists, not gonna happen.

gold bit.jpg

Characteristics of money.

  1. Store of value.
  2. Medium of exchange.
  3. Unit of account.

Classically trained economists will tell you you'll need to pick two of these and sacrifice the third. These days gold is an okay store of value and an okay unit of account, but an extremely poor medium of exchange. We live in a digital world now, and the only way to represent gold digitally is with derivatives, and derivatives are blatantly manipulated by institutions and only a ghost representation of the original asset backed by the promise of untrustworthy institutions.

Gold is very heavy. Even when in coin form, the medium of exchange of gold is lacking. A gold coin is worth a lot of money and can not be divided into smaller gold coins. This makes the divisibility a problem. When's the last time you paid with something using gold? Like me: Probably never in your entire life. Gold coins are antiques; worth more than the gold itself.

bagmoneydollarfiatinvestment.png

What about Bitcoin?

Bitcoin is clearly not a store of value. Calling it that is an insult. Rather, it is a unicorn asset that solves a mathematical networking problem thought to be impossible to navigate. It is doubling in value every year quite consistently (currently worth around $23k). It doesn't store value; it generates value via network effect at an alarming rate.

The main reason why comparing Bitcoin to gold is offensive is that gold is gold and will always be gold and can never be digital. Meanwhile Bitcoin will never be physical. They exist in two completely separate realities.

Bitcoin is programable money.

So while gold is gold and will always be just gold. Bitcoin and forks of Bitcoin (the cryptoverse as a whole) can be programmed to do exactly what we tell it to do. To compare this to gold in any way is just... ridiculous. There is no comparison.

But I haven't even gotten to the ultimate argument yet. The thing that makes crypto superior to every other medium of exchange on the planet is that it is impossible to counterfeit. This is something that gold, paper, or digital fiat could EVER hope to achieve. Since the beginning of time if something was valuable, someone was going to find a way to fake it and turn a profit. You can't do that with crypto. Thousands of nodes are all maintaining the ledger simultaneously. No one's going to pull a fast one on the Bitcoin network, and if they somehow did it would be painfully obvious and transparently flawed. Shadowbankers beware! Crypto is infinitely easier to verify than any other valuable asset on the planet.

gold.jpg

Robust Redundancy: Crypto Compliments Gold and Silver

Another ridiculous thing about this whole debacle is that calling Bitcoin Gold 2.0 implies that once Bitcoin goes mainstream, gold is going to lose all its value proposition. Again, this is ridiculous, as I have laid out in the post linked above.

If I was a crypto millionaire, I would definitely be diversifying into gold and silver. Not as an investment, but as a hedge in order to have an actual PHYSICAL asset that will retain its value. Bitcoin is an abundance technology, and it would be foolish to think that a bunch of new money libertarian/anarchist millionaires weren't going to buy gold/silver with their gains.

In fact, I maintain that so much physical gold and silver is going to be purchased within ten years that the derivatives market is going to be exposed for the fraud that it is. The emperor has no clothes: All of the physical PMs are going to be scooped up off the market, and no one is going to want that digital garbage that doesn't actually represent PMs.

How do I know this?

For the same reason you can't peg crypto to physical assets or supply chains. There is no way to securely peg a physical asset to a digital one. It requires too much trust, and that trust ultimately becomes exploited and corrupted over time. We have already reached peak corruption in this regard. People will either buy physical PMs (likely linked to crypto in some way like a Bitcoin logo minted on it) or they will buy digital crypto. A bridge between these two worlds is totally a pointless and counterproductive centralized attack vector. The idea only exists out of ignorance and our projections of the legacy economy onto crypto.

golden shower office michael scott.jpg

DEFI

SoV, UoA, MoE. Remember when economists claimed we could only have two of these and not all three? Well that is also becoming an antiquated statement with yield farms. It's obvious now that hyperinflationary yield farming is the solution to storing and even generating value while at the same time providing a stable base for Unit of Account measurements.

MoE

It's also extremely noteworthy that the entire cryptosphere is working together to build infrastructure that strengthens the medium of exchange variable across all tokens on the planet. For example, whenever a Bitcoin debit card emerges, that helps every token. Even though only Bitcoin can be spent on the card, it is trivially easy to turn any crypto into Bitcoin, so this infrastructure increases the value proposition in the medium of exchange department for every crypto indirectly. This is a silver sliver deck. The synergy and open source nature of crypto can be witnessed and experienced everywhere. There is no competition, and anyone who says otherwise is wrongfully projecting venture capitalism onto the space.

Conclusion

Comparing crypto to precious metals is an insult and a gross oversimplification. The Internet is not a printing-press 2.0. Precious metals will never be anything other than what they already are. Meanwhile crypto is evolving exponentially and creating systems of extreme synergy and exponential gains that can not be tamed by the legacy markets and derivatives. Bitcoin ETFs are nothing to worry about. Crypto explodes across all barriers and borders.

The value proposition of Bitcoin has nothing to do with scarcity and everything to do with security, networking, and 100% authenticity guaranteed. However when when we compare to Bitcoin to other cryptos we can easily see that the only thing BTC has over them is security and first-move advantage. At the same time, this perceived competition is an illusion, as Bitcoin's security and value proposition can only benefit the other networks in the cryptoverse.

Posted Using LeoFinance Beta



0
0
0.000
30 comments
avatar

All of the physical PMs are going to be scooped up off the market, and no one is going to want that digital garbage that doesn't actually represent PMs.

This.

Posted Using LeoFinance Beta

0
0
0.000
avatar

So then why is Hive "Web 3.0?"

0
0
0.000
avatar
(Edited)

Hive is a lot of things. Web 3.0 signifies the shift of capital from Web 2.0. Web 2.0 represents a business model based on free service in exchange for ad revenue and data monetization. In Web 3.0, users provably own their accounts. In Web 2.0, they do not. Web 2.0 is grossly centralized, Web 3.0 is not. Web 3.0 is 99% open source. Web 2.0 is 99% closed-source.

The difference between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 is measurable and makes sense.
The difference between Gold and Gold 2.0 is a vast chasm of delusion; totally unconnected.
It's like apples and oranges... or rather more like calling apples: Dirt 2.0.
It is a logical leap of faith so vast there is no way to bridge it.

Meanwhile the concept of Web 3.0 would still exist even if Hive did not.
Web 3.0 is much bigger than Hive.

0
0
0.000
avatar

They want to keep gold valuable by linking its name to Bitcoin But this is totally unfair.

0
0
0.000
avatar

I think you are a little ahead of your time with this analysis.
Although this is exactly what many forks of Bitcoin do.
Leech the brand name for legitimacy.

0
0
0.000
avatar

I don't think yield farms will keep something valuable. Yield farms to me seems like a ponzi scheme because compared to fiat, yields are ridiculous and I think someone's going to be holding the bag at the end of it all.

Bitcoin is a really elaborate ponzi scheme. It has no functional use cases, just people want it so it's worth a lot. Also since it infested a big part of the world, it can't collapse because so many things are leveraged upon it. So it's here to stay, but it's also inherently worthless.

0
0
0.000
avatar
(Edited)

USD (and the stock market) is an even more elaborate ponzi scheme, and I've already explained how the main value proposition of Bitcoin is that it's impossible to counterfeit. Fiat, on the other hand, is very easy to counterfeit, especially by those who control it.

I'm more fascinated by the fact that anyone could make it this far into the game only to comment on my blog about how it's all a scam. How is that possible? Seems far more likely that you're just trolling me for a reaction.

0
0
0.000
avatar

Fiat is backed by the government which owns tangible assets and runs services. And "impossible to counterfeit" doesn't mean much if thing in question has no value.
The mining of bitcoin does not generate value. Transactions are also possible without using blockchain too. Blockchain is a solution looking for a problem to solve.

0
0
0.000
avatar

I think you've been reading too many articles from 2013.
There are historic records of seashells being used as currency.
Try explaining that fact using the same logic.
Spoiler alert: you can't.
Your logic doesn't sync up with indisputable reality.

0
0
0.000
avatar

I think it's just the comparison people run towards when trying to explain why BTC's value keeps going up. I used it quite a few times myself and I think the tokenomics are the main reason why I think it will continue to go up.

Posted Using LeoFinance Beta

0
0
0.000
avatar

I guess you'll have to refactor that outlook when dozens of coins continue to go up, all with completely unique tokenomic models. The only factor that gives these extremely inefficient solutions value is the fact that the legacy economy is at the brink of complete systemic failure. Decentralization is not viable or profitable when we can trust authority.

0
0
0.000
avatar

It's possible I will have to rethink it but I guess it will probably stay until I start seeing it happen. For the most part I was considering it more due to the deflationary nature and even ETH is starting to burn tokens so it may become deflationary as well.

Posted Using LeoFinance Beta

0
0
0.000
avatar

Congratulations @edicted! You have completed the following achievement on the Hive blockchain and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :

You have been a buzzy bee and published a post every day of the week.

You can view your badges on your board and compare yourself to others in the Ranking
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word STOP

To support your work, I also upvoted your post!

Check out the last post from @hivebuzz:

Hive Power Up Day - November 1st 2021 - Hive Power Delegation
Bee ready for the 2nd Hive Power Up Month challenge!
Support the HiveBuzz project. Vote for our proposal!
0
0
0.000
avatar

We need to keep developing Web 3.0... We're in for interesting times

0
0
0.000
avatar

It doesn't store value; it generates value via network effect at an alarming rate.

This is absolutely the best way to put it. I have been looking for words to explain Bitcoin to non-crypto enthusiasts. Thanks for this

0
0
0.000
avatar

Bitcoin is gold 2.0, and that doesn't denigrate Bitcoin. It means Bitcoin is everything gold is, and more. Not that Bitcoin is only a gold analog.

0
0
0.000
avatar

You make very good points. I agree with your conclusion completely.

Any maximalism in the crypto space is deluded. Bitcoin dominance is on a long term downward trajectory. While most other cryptos won't appreciate against BTC in the long term, some already have and even more will in the future.

0
0
0.000
avatar

Do you think there is a token that could be used every day as a regular currency? Is it Hive? Something else? Great read by the way!

0
0
0.000
avatar

The only way for cryptocurrency to become a unit-of-account with stable value is via hyperinflation and AMM liquidity pools. The community must then set up rules that manipulate inflation and yield to create a steady value.

Hive must create AMM liquidity pools and print way more inflation to accomplish such a feat. This is something that very few people (if any) actually want to do, as most people in this space still wrongfully think that deflationary economics are the way to go, despite thousands of years of economic theory that proves otherwise.

However, I'm not worried either way. Hive is already very unique in that bandwidth is farmed via yield.
This alone will create some very exciting synergies going forward.

Also, most AMM yield farming networks don't have to allocate inflation to security (block rewards) and are simply built on top of another network that handles the security (usually EVM networks (like ETH and BSC and Polygon, etc).

0
0
0.000
avatar

Very interesting! Thanks for the insight! I am not sure I understand all of it, but it gives me something to research now!

0
0
0.000
avatar

One thing we don't understand about gold and Bitcoin are heavy currency. You can't compare the two of them. If you come in terms of trade Bitcoin is a heavy currency more than gold. If you lose 10 pip in BTC and lose 10 pip in gold currency. You will understand which one is heavy. But know both of them have make name Just that many know about gold more than BTC.

Posted Using LeoFinance Beta

0
0
0.000
avatar

Good point about bitcoin being impossible to counterfeit - it's a point the press and politicians miss and maybe the crypto community needs to highlight this more.

0
0
0.000
avatar
(Edited)

Most people don't know that the Secret Service's #1 job is to protect USD and stop counterfeiting.
Protecting the president is just a side job.

That's a lot of overhead when you add it all up,
all of which is solved for free with crypto.

0
0
0.000
avatar

Hi @edicted this piece actually made my day i've been exposed to very resourceful info great input put out thanks.

0
0
0.000