Bitcoin vs Gold Debate Settled

[teosanru]

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Steve Wozniak is famous for making some of the sharper comments in the gold vs bitcoin debate:

Wozniak Thinks Bitcoin Is Better Than Gold

OCTOBER 23, 2017

He said, gold does not necessarily have a fixed supply either, because humans will continue to find more efficient ways to dig it out of the earth.

“Gold gets mined and mined and mined,” Wozniak said. “Maybe there’s a finite amount of gold in the world, but Bitcoin is even more mathematical and regulated and nobody can change mathematics.”

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/money2020-wozniak-thinks-bitcoin-better-gold

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That's a great interview in the link btw. Highly recommend. Wozniak's comments about the evolution of ground penetrating radar coupled with more efficient methods being devised to mine gold. Contrasting with bitcoin's mining being statically regulated by algorithm. That has always stuck with me as one of the smartest things said in the gold vs bitcoin debate.

After years of debate BTCitcoin is pulling ahead of gold on short term charts.

Can we announce bitcoin the winner. Or would it be premature.

Haha I thought forum is now free from this old shit of comparing gold vs bitcoin but here we are again almost about to reach 2021 but the debate is still not over. Moreover I am surprised to know that people feel that price is a barometer for deciding whether one of them has won a debate or not? First of all let me tell you gold too is simple mathematics there is a finite amount of gold on this earth it's just that currently we don't have the "Mining power" to extract all of it. We might have same by 2137. Heard of that year? yeah that's the year until we will be able to mine the last satoshi of Bitcoin so aren't both the same this way? Moreover let me tell you practicallity mathematics is useful at school and pretty useful for scientist. But in real world such things are measured using "Finance" which says value of something would be the amount of utility it generates or the cash flows it generates. Surprisingly increasing BTC price is not giving either of them. You can get cash flows by selling BTC but that isn't really a cash flow that's merely a speculation of increased pricing while increasing price and adoption is sinking down the utility due to scalability issues. So tell me how can you end a debate between a 2000 year old asset and 10 year old asset within a few years?

[magneto]

The scale in that graph is skewed towards gold, so in reality BTC has far outperformed gold during this pandemic downturn.

I wholeheartedly agree with Wozniak.

The derivation of gold's value comes from mainly the fact that a) there is a finite known supply of gold that cannot necessarily be mined at an accelerated pace by humans without significant financing and b) there is great trust in its status as a store of value.

BTC is all that, but a much better payment processor for day-to-day transactions and its supply is fixed by mathematical certainties - which is why you will see an increasing amount of wealth managers and funds diversifying into this category.

[hatshepsut93]

Bitcoin and gold are too different to say that one is better than the other. Bitcoin is much more volatile and risky, so it's already a bad idea to measure their pure performance without considering it. When investors buy gold, they buy a guarantee that it won't crash for 50% in one day. When investors buy Bitcoin, they buy an opportunity to see a 20% growth in one day. Also gold has been in use for thousands of years, so people can be sure that it won't suddenly start degrading due to some chemical reactions, while Bitcoin still haven't been fully tested in some extreme scenarios.

[wheelz1200]

Always a good debate but I dont think one is "better" than the other.  They compliment each other as asset classes.  Just because stocks over the course of years outperforms bonds, it doesn't mean stocks are better than bonds.  Its a means to diversify and limit risk at any given point. I am pro bitcoin vs gold but bitcoin has shown to drop much more fierce than gold will, same with the inverse on the way up.  Its more risk management at this point as to which one you want to buy or how to weight them in your portfolio.

[AndySt]

Bitcoin and gold are too different to say that one is better than the other. Bitcoin is much more volatile and risky, so it's already a bad idea to measure their pure performance without considering it. When investors buy gold, they buy a guarantee that it won't crash for 50% in one day. When investors buy Bitcoin, they buy an opportunity to see a 20% growth in one day. Also gold has been in use for thousands of years, so people can be sure that it won't suddenly start degrading due to some chemical reactions, while Bitcoin still haven't been fully tested in some extreme scenarios.

It all depends from the point of view of which person we are talking about, on the degree of risk that is acceptable. Because when it comes to a protective asset, in this case, gold is much preferable due to the mechanisms of interaction with the market that have already been formed for centuries and the more or less expected reaction of the market to unfavorable conditions. Gold is accepted as a protective asset by all market participants. Bitcoin is relatively young, not all investors treat bitcoin with full seriousness and are ready to work with it.

[poodle63]

If we see it from functionality then yes Bitcoin definitely helps a lot of people solving the problem of sending money across countries around the globe. Gold honestly is just mineral, maybe it can be used to create things for example jewelry but in term of finance, it's not really useful except for preserving wealth.
It just depends whether you could take advantage of Bitcoin as cryptocurrency or just settle with gold because its "precious" in the eyes of many people.

[Latviand]

Yes it's too early. Bitcoin still has various weaknesses that we won't find in gold such as transaction fees and dependence on electricity. We should look at the differences between the two based on the objective so as not to overly compare which of them is the best, gold is absolute stability and bitcoin is effectiveness.

There's no such thing as a perfect asset so we should also consider their flaws to understand their differences.

Bitcoin can be manipulated in the market it depends on the market situation and this asset should have a lot of attention and observation.

While in Gold, you will just leave it and wait for more time to increase its price. This is not a high maintenance asset compared to cryptocurrencies and we have different preferences when we plan to invest on a certain assets.

[oHnK]

It all depends from the point of view of which person we are talking about, on the degree of risk that is acceptable.

There's no such thing as a perfect asset so we should also consider their flaws to understand their differences.

Yes, no one type of investment is perfect. However, the fewer the shortcomings of an investment, it can be said that the investment is better than others. We can also compare gold vs bitcoin from many sides, in terms of price stability, gold will be better than bitcoin, in terms of its long existence and evidence, gold is better than bitcoin. However, on the liquidity side, bitcoin is superior to gold. on the advantage of speculation, bitcoin is also superior to gold. There are many more points that can be compared depending on the investor's point of view, the more variables used in comparing these two assets, the more accurate the investment results will be.

[ChiBitCTy]

Time after time we continue to see posts about "bitcoin vs gold", and time after time they are completely misguided posts.  What you need to understand is that bitcoin and gold are not competitors.  Gold is a physical asset used for a number of things such as jewelry and electronics.  Bitcoin is a digital currency.  They do have similarities in that they are both considered assets, a store of value and investments. The best portfolio is a diversified portfolio and owning both bitcoin and gold makes a lot of sense, not choosing between one or the other.

[Vishnu.Reang]

Gold is being considered as a store of value and that is the reason why it's demand increased when the stock markets went down in March-April this year. On the other hand, a volatile asset such as Bitcoin can never be used as a store of value and therefore it is not possible to compare gold with Bitcoin. The equivalent for gold in the cryptocurrency sector is stablecoins such as USDT and USDC.

[bits4books]

To be honest - I absolutely do not care what the published programmer who "once worked at Apple".
I'm more interested in what Wozniak will do with BTC if the lights are turned off. And not only to him but also to the rest of the world. Or the entire Internet will fall and many other different scenarios.
What to do with the dead souls of your coins? Just cry.
I can at least use gold as just the same exchange equivalent as one of the classics of trading, and BTC will remain in history. Just think.
Btw, he created own crypto and now he spreading fomo about it. Nothing new here

[Silberman]

Perhaps I initially did not understand the essence of the issue and the confrontation between Bitcoin and gold, but I never considered Bitcoin to be gold competitors. These are the best assets a self-respecting investor can have. At the same time.

They are assets with similar characteristics so they are in fact rivals, this is the same as in any other market, apple and microsoft are rivals despite both of those companies wanting to achieve very much the same goals and the same is true for bitcoin and for gold, both groups of people behind them want the same, the replacement of the fiat system for one based on their asset and we know that even if there can be some parallelism and both coins could be used at the same time there can only be one winner and we want that our side wins not only for ideological reasons but also for the economic benefits that will come our way.

[jaysabi]

both are different and in my opinion it is not debatable, gold has a much more stable value and is also a real thing that we can see while bitcoin has an indeterminate value and we can only see it as a number

The only reason the value of bitcoin is more volatile while the value of gold is more stable is because gold has been around for thousands of years, people trust gold and a huge amount of money is already invested in it while bitcoin is a new technology that was developed only 10 years ago and that only now institutional investors are coming to the market and have begun to buy, once a great deal of the population of the world adopt bitcoin its value will become more stable.

Gold is quite volatile as week compared to fiat in the short term. The USD has lost value slowly and predictably, nowhere near as volatile as gold is on a semi-regular basis and definitely nowhere near any crypto ever at any point in any of their histories.

[Traderbtcc]

This is by far the best answer have gotten in this Bitcoin vs gold debate, even if I know bitcoin always had more advantages compared to gold.

Actually, we should not debate about those two because both have different unique attributes like he said gold supply can not be measured but Bitcoin is fixed because math can not be changed. But Gold has a physical form which also makes it unique from bitcoin. People also trust what they see so for now we can say both are very good investment sites and both have potential growth over time.

Gold has been in existence a long time ago that's why it has gained the trust of its investors, whereas bitcoin has been around for just 11years now but its slowly attracting those big investors, gold is in a physical form and its quite heavy to carry around unlike bitcoin where you can hold any amount of money in your mobile wallet or ledger wallet.