White House Says Gold Reserves May Be Used to Purchase Bitcoin
White House Says Gold Reserves May Be Used to Purchase Bitcoin
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/289657
This reality is so fucking stupid. Let's sell something of value to buy something that is only valuable if someone really wants it bad enough.
To be fair, gold is the same. It's just more well established since it's been around much longer.
Not defending this shit, just pointing out that gold is also only worth what people are willing to pay for it. That's kind of how all markets work.
Gold works without energy. It doesnt oxidise or decay as other materials
Seriously when people say gold is worthless, what a joke. There is very little of it, as you mentioned it doesn't oxidize, it's the metal used in microchips. It ain't sea shells or tulip bulbs or Bitcoin, that's for sure.
I would agree for the case that we're truly in end times where nobody has anything and people fight over scraps of food, that gold might be worthless.
It's still your best bet for all other scenarios that don't involve you hiding in a cave and eating bugs.
And even THEN, gold is a shiny, pretty metal that doesn't oxidize like other shiny metals. So the tyrants of the apocalyptic wastelands will STILL want it for jewelry.
I think that's the moment you don't want to have Gold on you.
You think the end times are going to be characterized by no one having anything?
I think the end times is the short period before the end.
If it is sudden, gold does matter even less.
Did I say it was worthless? It's worth whatever people are willing to pay for it for its industrial purposes. That's it.
If I was starving gold would still be worthless to me, regardless of how it oxidizes.
With a bar of gold you can crush someone's skull in and steal their food. Try do that with Bitcoin.
You can use Bitcoin miners for that
Or feast on the delicious goo that comes out
horrific Viserys noises
If all society broke down and all currencies became worthless gold would still have value as it has intrinsic value due to its chemical properties. Bitcoin would be worth nothing
There are easier and cheaper means of exchange. Indigenous people all over the world had access to gold but used it for decoration and not trade.
Gold is pretty damn “cheap” to use as a currency it’s a softer metal with a lower melting point which allows it to be easily minted and then since its properties are somewhat unique it makes it harder to counterfeit without more complex technology. It is also rare enough that small bits of it can be used for currency so you don’t have to use something like the giant stone discs of yap. Some places used food for currency like rice or cocoa beans but those had too little value per unit of currency which made them annoying.
I really suggest you read Graeber’s “Debt” to get a more complete picture of how economies can work. It’s not all giant stone discs.
Plus there’s tons of ways gold can be adulterated. Devaluing gold currency is incredibly easy, as is shaving or sweating the coins to get your own gold.
I already mentioned that gold wasn’t the only option and talked about how other civilizations did it but the vast majority of the world used metals because they were the best. Nowadays it really doesn’t matter because the value of wealth in the world vastly exceeds what all the precious metals would be worth combined. But if all the nukes go off, society is destroyed, and technology is thrown back hundreds of years, then gold still has a purpose and people will happily barter for it since they know someone else will want it. Bitcoin will not have value.
You can try and come up with whatever justification you want but as you are just downvoting everything I say I am done arguing
Relevant Homer Simpson:
Which is why they airlift bundles of cash when there’s a famine and not, you know, food.
Gold coins are very filling
If you had gold and you are starving, then you deserve to die.
The difference is gold has carried high monetary value among human societies for nearly 3000 years while Bitcoin is a non tangible digital asset that's existed for less than two decades and remains incredibly volatile.
This comes across as another Trump scam. He's going to bankrupt the American government by siphoning public money to himself and other private entities and the American people are going to be stuck hodling the bag.
That, and gold actually has properties that make it useful, like not oxidizing and being a good conductor. It still has value even if it was otherwise worthless as a currency
If bitcoin was otherwise worthless as a currency, then it would still be useful for secure time stamps.
This comes across as another Trump scam.
I guarantee his family and "friends" already own a lot of BTC.
Gold has value by itself, just look up it's applications in the semiconductor industry
Outside of money, PoW blockchains are useful for secure time stamps.
Why single out PoW? PoS also documents hashes immutably over time.
Because then people would have to admit that bitcoin isn't crypto, and PoS consumes something like 99.9% less power than PoW.
Because we're talking about value by itself, outside of money. So HashCash for emails is useful even if there's no money involved, but locking up a dozen Stanley Nickels doesn't cost anything.
Hey everybody, check out THIS metal, its all yellowy and pretty!
And it never rusts
And is malleable enough to allow for coinage.
