No it would not.

It costs money to mine gold from the gold mines so it would not be possible to extract the gold at a rate that you could sell it to cause a price crash.

If you would find a large gold mine, mine the gold and sell it, there would be no other effect other then if the same amount of gold was sold by existing holders of gold.

Cash is good for medium sized transactions in person. If you were to go to a hot dog vendor for example cash is likely the best way to pay for your food. The payment phase of buying a hotdog is very short, only ~30 seconds, less then the time it would take to show a QR code, scan it, broadcast it and the vendor seeing it register as a 0/unconfirmed tx on the network.

Cash also provides a greater level of anonymity then BTC as it is generally not feasible to track where individual dollar bills have been in the past.

BTC is good for smaller transactions when the time between when payment is made and when the product is delivered is greater. For example when you use BTC to buy a coffee from a coffee shop it will take some time to give the customer the coffee from the time that payment is received. So the process will be: Give customer QR code to pay, customer scans QR code, and broadcasts transaction to pay for coffee, vendor prepares coffee while verifying the 0/unconfirmed has been broadcast, vendor delivers coffee to customer at their table.

BTC is also good for smaller, high margin purchases. The above coffee transaction costs the vendor very little to create the coffee so they would lose very little in a double spend attack.

I am not sure about UK tax law, but I am pretty sure that US tax law says that when you exchange one property for another property you will need to treat it as if you first sold your first property for cash and then used that cash for the 2nd property.

An example of this is as follows:
You have 100 shares of company ABC that you bought for $1 each (total cost basis of $100). The shares of ABC are now worth $50 each (total value $5,000, total appreciation, $4,900).

You exchange these 100 shares of ABC for 20 shares of company XYZ. Company XYZ are worth $250 each and the total
value of these 20 share is $5,000.

My understanding is that you would need to pay taxes on the 4900, which is the difference between the value of the shares you bought verses the cost basis of the share you purchased.


I don't see how this would be the case. BTC is easily converted into fiat. If a buyer or seller is desperate (or otherwise urgently wants/needs to complete the transaction then the other will have an advantage.


There are many services that assist merchants/sellers/businesses in accepting bitcoin (coinbase, bitpay, MtGox(before they failed).

Sales were inflated when they first started accepting BTC as many BTC holders likely bought on overstock simply because they were accepting BTC, not because they needed what they were buying. Sales were also inflated because some people also likely bought with BTC on overstock because it was "the new thing" and wanted to test using BTC.

IMO the sales level on overstock are at a more normalized level and will rise and fall with depending on how much BTC is utilized by the general population.