81–90 of 98 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A year of my salary is between 1lbs to 2lbs of gold at current prices. Hiding a few pounds of something isn't very difficult, I do it every Christmas.
How would you go about using 1lb of gold to procure food, water and fuel in a crisis bad enough to disable government/banking? History has shown than people usually lose all their gold in situations like this, pretty much all the time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A large fraction of gold mined every year is used for its material properties in industrial and electronic applications. I thought that was less than 10%. That's a very low floor! (That said, gold is sound money)
I read 7% of 2024 demand is industrial. Gold ended 2024 at $2600.
~3,300 tons where mined in 2024
“Industrial and tech demand accounted for 83 tons of gold in the third quarter” of 2024. 83 * 4 = 332 so ~10% which is fairly typical.
Whether the price goes up or down from here, one notion has been sufficiently shattered over the last couple of years - that Bitcoin is a stable ~source~ store of value that acts has a hedge against inflation and currency control by governments. While assets like gold and silver have surged in the same time period due to political and economic uncertainty, as one may expect, Bitcoin has gone in the opposite direction…
> that Bitcoin is a stable source of value no sane person could have ever held that notion - there is no underlying value.
Vibes guy here. I dabbled in Bitcoin for about a year, on the notion that if the world's overall financial system got degraded, more people would view Bitcoin holdings as a safe way to preserve value. Maybe better than owning physical gold. Why not get in early before the next stampede? But I was wrong about bitcoin > gold. It's worked the other way around. There's also persistent chatter that the supposedly uncracka…
The biggest problem with metals is the same as crypto - there's no fundamental underlying value like P/E or product announcements you can anchor the price to - so its free to fluctuate. How much of a problem that actually is we got to find out last Friday.
To me it’s only true use is to anonymize payments (which requires some work to truly anonymize properly) - I see it as a system you dive in and out of. Not hold in. Simply because it’s not backed by anything it has no implied stability. At least the dollar (not backed properly anymore) has one of the largest world powers behind it keeping it floating along. There isn’t one of those for BTC…
I think most crypto is really all about another market for pump and dumps, a Wild West without much regulation…
Much like AI’s promise about letting humans enjoy a life with less labor, the idea sounds great but its reality is the majority of people just truthfully to make more money one way or another.
I don’t view it as any way to “preserve value” To me it’s only true use is to anonymize payments (which requires some work to truly anonymize properly) - I see it as a system you dive in and out of. Not hold in. Simply because it’s not backed by anything it has no implied stability. At least the dollar (not backed properly anymore) has one of the largest world powers behind it keeping it floating along. There isn’t o…
The irony of this is that since every transaction and all its metadata is on chain, it has turned out to be easily traced back to the beginning of time. Fully open, the opposite of anonymized. (see: Chainalysis et. al.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gold and silver, besides industrial uses, have been used both as currency and jewelry for a long time.
And why are/were they used as currency?
A ring is just a coin you wear on your finger.
Vibes guy here. I dabbled in Bitcoin for about a year, on the notion that if the world's overall financial system got degraded, more people would view Bitcoin holdings as a safe way to preserve value. Maybe better than owning physical gold. Why not get in early before the next stampede? But I was wrong about bitcoin > gold. It's worked the other way around. There's also persistent chatter that the supposedly uncracka…
The biggest problem with metals is the same as crypto - there's no fundamental underlying value like P/E or product announcements you can anchor the price to - so its free to fluctuate. How much of a problem that actually is we got to find out last Friday.
And the P/E and product announcements your touting as inherent value are for generating value, not storing it. If your purpose was to store and transfer value, it would be stupid to use stocks over currency or gold
BTC failed to live up to it's own prophecy by not doubling from the last height of ca. 69420 to at least 140k in 2025. There was a last chance in October of last year, where it seemed to get close but ultimately it just didn't find enough buyers. Now with the narrative broken (bitcoin always goes up over the long term) one sell off will lead to the next as more and more people lose trust.
Bitcoin's proponents are its own biggest liability. People who see it as a speculative asset rather than a currency that needs to be a stable store of value. It, like all currency, has no ingerent value and its stupid to speculate on it