Bitcoin Forum

I think Bitcoin should be pegged to 1 gram of gold. This price would be easy to find for everyone, and everyone would know the exact price and WHY it is that price. No more denial of service attacks. No more Bitcoin  "bank holidays" like today.  Yes, gold can be manipulated, but it is a lot harder.

Thoughts?

if you have 1 gram to every coin, go for it, to my knowledge, you cant virtually peg it to something, it needs to be backed by it

Yes
Could the Bitcoin be pegged to gold.  As it would provide a genuine high-quality alternative to the U.S. dollar.

And who would hold all of that gold to back it up. Plus that would cause the price of bitcoins to drop to like $50 which would make many people unhappy. If you wanted to do this you would need to pin it to like 2 grams of gold and you would need to make an online exchange where you can also trade 1 btc for 2 grams of gold or 2 grams of gold for 1 btc regardless of their respective prices.

Maybe it could work if there was an organization of wealthy backers willing to put a few billion dollars on the line to put a price floor of $50/BTC on every Bitcoin exchange. But then they should keep increasing the floor level if the price stays much higher than $50.

There are a few things I'd like to point out.  First, gold holds its own intrinsic value, just like bitcoins.  Bitcoins and gold are similar in many ways, but are also entirely different from one another.  For this reason, I do not think you could ever peg bitcoin to gold.  It's not a bad idea and it would certainly make bitcoins more appealing to me.  Consider for a moment what would happen to the price of gold if it started being used more heavily in mining hardware(see Edit).  Would we be converting real gold into virtual gold?? I honestly don't know, so I'm asking...  Love this community btw.

Edit: By mining hardware, I mean the computer hardware that powers mining rigs.  GPUs, ASICs, and whatever is the next fastest thing.

Gold doesn't need to be "pegged" to anything, therefore Bitcoin shouldn't, either.

Well put. Bitcoins are valuable in their own way.  IMHO Bitcoins are undervalued right now.

dont think you can do that, you would need to create a new currency that has contracts written into the coin

Why not peg gold to the price of bitcoin instead?

Strike 1 - If you're pegging the value of bitcoin to gold, you need a central holding facility or accounting for the gold - end of decentralization.

Strike 2 - At present, bitcoin is functioning more like a commodity than a currency.  For most of the world, commodities are largely priced in local currency, not units of other commodities.

Strike 3 - If bitcoin is to stand on its own under the lighting it has been cast, it needs to do just that - stand on its own.

Let's just ask the bitcoin regulation agency to do that right away.

I don't think that is a particularly good idea. Pegging btc to gold defies the purpose of an independent alternative.

Also, virtually no major currency in the world is still underwritten by gold. Money simple has the value that people (or markets) assign to them. The same is true for btc. And so far it seems to be working...

"pegging" is the opposite of the point of a decentralized non-government controlled currency
let the market decide the value, nothing more