As btc nears gold parity the gold bugs have come out against btc hard. Seems to happen
First Rickards trolled bitcoiners on twitter:
"Soon I'll be able to pay $1,250 in paper for (1) a solid ounce of fine gold, or (2) some electrons called "bitcoin." Hmm, tough choice. #Not"
Then Peter Schiff debated Brian Kelly (NautilusCoin) on CNBC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rdz2DWrHW8&feature=youtu.beThen Roy Sebag (GoldMoney) calls out some prominent bitcoiners on Twitter to debate Gold v Bitcoin
Dear @barrysilbert or @aantonop or @ErikVoorhees - You three strike as most impressive pro-bitcoin speakers. I have a debate proposal:
I will offer $25k to a charity of your choice if any of you debate me in an open forum. I will for Gold, you for Bitcoin. NYC Location
This comes across to me as gold proponents defending their turf. Rickards and Schiff haven't changed their arguments since 2013, although Rickards is at least accepting of bitcoin as a form of currency. Schiff is just stuck with the 'merchants convert it to USD'. But what they all do is refer back to classical economic 'characteristics' as reasons why bitcoin cannot be X or Y or Z. When they shake their heads or disparage bitcoin they risk being like the economists they themselves argue with and label as having 'cognitive dissonance'.
Bitcoin is software that enables something new, solves age old problems and offers a degree of freedom formerly not available in the computer age. It may fail. But, in a connected, insecure world it has tremendous utility. Being able to send data and have an immutable record of it without a third party is especially valuable. When the access to that immutable ledger is capped, as long as demand grows, the value of that access should grow.
Will gold ever have a place as a monetary backstop? I wouldn't rule it out, kind of like a 'reversion to the mean'; perhaps if things get bad enough (but not MadMax bad) we will revert to some form of Gold Standard (perhaps a reason why CB's have been net buyers for years). I think gold / btc are complimentary and provide a bridge between generations; most boomers won't understand btc and most millenials don't give a shit about gold. But they do offer some similarities (hedge v govt) while having appeal to their specific generation - ie, millenials are internet natives.
But whether gold proponents like it or not is irrelevant as long as btc keeps working and 'the geeks that inherit the earth' continue to create solutions that destroy old paradigms.
I reminded of the quote
“Every fact of science was once damned. Every invention was considered impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire web of culture and ‘progress,’ everything on earth that is man-made and not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of some man’s refusal to bow to Authority. We would own no more, know no more, and be no more than the first apelike hominids if it were not for the rebellious, the recalcitrant, and the intransigent. As Oscar Wilde truly said, ‘Disobedience was man’s Original Virtue.”
Robert Anton Wilson
