Hedge fund boss: Bitcoin over gold? Are you kidding?

[CryptoCurrencyInc.com]

Hedge fund boss: Bitcoin over gold? Are you kidding?

Hedge fund manager Paul Singer is "shocked" by Bitcoin's rise, especially given gold's fall.

"There is no more reason to believe that bitcoin will stand the test of time than that governments will protect the value of government-created money, although bitcoin is newer and we always look at babies with hope," Singer wrote in a letter to investors of his $23.3 billion Elliott Management on Jan. 27.

"If you want an alternative currency, check out gold. It has stood the test of thousands of years as a store of value and medium of exchange," Singer added.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2014/02/01/cnbc-bitcoin-gold/5038763/

[bitpop]

He's quaking

[corebob]

I never understood economists view of Bitcoin.

Gold is completely useless to me. I can't buy anything with gold. Nobody accepts it as payment.
They also use the word bubble a lot. Apparently they don't see the difference of bitcoins and the price of bitcoins.
The price of bitcoins can be a bubble. The technology behind bitcoin can not.

I also think they underestimate how fed up people are with government controlled currencies. They certainly did a controlled dive into the financial crisis.
Same with so called trusted services. If a service is "trusted", it has backdoors. People are not the horde of sheep they thought they were, and now they act surprised.

[bitpop]

People think that gold is useful. They think ibm will come to them with a million dollars and not spend the money developing an alternative. Same with those catalyst metals.

[Mr. Socko]

I personally don't like gold because it's actually fairly abundant with limited usefulness... much of it is held in big vaults by large governments. Silver is more useful and less abundant and I prefer that. Plus lower price is easier to barter with 90% US circulated silver dimes for example.

I prefer minor metals and platinum group metals though a lot of them have already made their moves. Tellurium is one that made big moves, but not one I was willing to work with because of it's side effects should you happen to come in contact with it and have it absorbed into your body... a nasty garlic type body odor that can last for weeks or months!  
 
Here's a fun one to play around with:

http://www.disappearingspoons.com/

[minerpart]

Gold is a currency of very limited utility in this age of the internet.

Can you send gold through the internet to pay a bill or transfer gold to a friend in another country? Can you pay for goods on Overstock with Gold? No, and you never will be able to.

Even in the real world - can you use gold over the counter to pay for goods? Can you walk around with a pocket full of gold while out on a shopping trip and be safe? Gold is an asset class only because it is a sought after commodity for jewellery. If we didn't use gold in jewellery it's value would be lower than that of copper. There are many rare elements that are worth next to nothing because there is no demand for them. Bitcoin is becoming an asset class because of it's utility. In the near future it will be in demand as the virtual currency of exchange. So just like gold it's asset value will be based firmly on it's desirability by the wider public. Not everyone wears gold but soon almost everyone will be spending bitcoins. So it is both the new Gold and the new virtual currency to topple many monopolised aspects of the closed-shop FIAT network.

[bitgeek]

Gold? Come on man Let's say fiat dies and I have a gold coin that used to be worth a few thousand - how will I ever divide it? Scrape some dust off it every time I want to buy something? Melt it? Gold is dead as a payment method, it has only store and sentimental value, like art.

[TeeBone]

Gold is beautiful. That's all it needs. Humans have and always will value beauty. Like fine art, etc. Gold will always have value and will be around long after bitcoin is gone, whether you like it or not.

[BTCisthefuture]

I think he's right on hi view about gold.


For bitcoin it seems he just thinks its strength is its libertarian aspects (no gov backing/no central banking)  but he might fail to realize how great it is for spending money in the internet age, it's benefits in international remittance,  benefits in microtransactions , and the fact that more and more places continue to accept bitcoin as a payment option which continues to give it more benefit.   I'd be curious to pick his brain on it,  he really didn't say too much about bitcoin itself , I'd be curious to find out what he really knows or undertands about the benefits that bitcoin does offer.

[Enkel]

The author has this on his wikipedia page: "Fortune described Singer as "a passionate defender of the 1% and a rising Republican power broker"."

Is it any wonder that he's singing the tune that supports his chosen team? The fact is that, if I remember correctly, he's a big pusher of gold paper. Not physical gold, but paper that says you have some interest in gold. Gold is sliding and his butt's a puckerin' because he's been pushing that paper for a long time.

The fact is that the 1% can jump in on Bitcoin at any time (and many probably already have) so he can say what ever he wants (or what ever he's being paid to say). His clients are still going to have their own brains and can tell the difference between a useable currency and something that sits burried in basements and vaults for that day when the SHTF and they suddenly realize that gold sucks as a currency.  When the SHTF in reality, medicine, munitions and munchies will be more valuable than gold.  But, in the mean time, a lot of people will get ripped off by these pitch men and their 'mainstream platforms'. (Remember how hard Glenn Beck was pitching gold on his show?  Yeah, that turned out to be a company that was ripping off little old ladies. Something you really can't do with bitcoin.)

[bitpop]

Pieces of shit like him also charge a huge premium. If you want gold, at least buy at bullionvault or kitco not some scam

[franky1]

the investor wants people to buy his gold, so that he can cash-out of gold. but more and more people are turning to bitcoin and leaving him with less buyers, meaning he has to lower prices to get rid of his heavy asset.

i feel sorry for him in ways, he has probably spend millions on warehouse storage, security, transportation, just to secure his assets, yet the rest of us get to secure our assets with a random jumble of characters on the keyboard, as if a 2yo was given a keyboard and asked to play with it for 2 minutes. such is the beauty of bitcoin, when gold investors waste their money on security and advertising, but we get it all "free-ish"

and as for the "test of time".. the romans were around for 1300 years, they were refered to as the most elite force in the world.... but where are they now?

[Honeypot]

I never understood economists view of Bitcoin.

Gold is completely useless to me. I can't buy anything with gold. Nobody accepts it as payment.
They also use the word bubble a lot. Apparently they don't see the difference of bitcoins and the price of bitcoins.
The price of bitcoins can be a bubble. The technology behind bitcoin can not.

I also think they underestimate how fed up people are with government controlled currencies. They certainly did a controlled dive into the financial crisis.
Same with so called trusted services. If a service is "trusted", it has backdoors. People are not the horde of sheep they thought they were, and now they act surprised.

Gold has an intrinsic value beyond just being relatively rare and pretty to look at. Its industrial value as a crucial element of electronics, sensitive circuits, and other modern innovations give it a values above and beyond that of a mere luxury item.

Same goes for diamonds, although many people are only aware of the 'luxury item' aspect of it - some of the initial designs for mirrors and equipments in the SDI research (defunct, but still produced numerous branching off topics of research that benefited us later on - that's how scientific innovations work) included natural and artificial diamond as a component.

Bitcoin's 'intrinsic' value depends entirely upon its decentralization, security, ease of usage and ability to more easily reach people.

However, you can see how each and every one of those ideals (backed by technical aspects of bitcoin itself) is meeting obstacles every step of the way.

Is the crypto community dealing with them and advancing crypto in a positive way? No.

Instead, we see bitching and moaning about the 'rah rah rah fite da powa' bullshit that alienates many if only by their sheer infantile mentality and shallow motivations behind their complaints.

There's a reason why even someone like this hedgefund boss has an edge over your average bitcoiners. To the common public, crypto participant is a daydreaming ne'er to do well sitting in front of his computer with delusions of hitting it big someday.

If you want crypto to actually grow, start acting professional.

TLDR - check yourselves.

[Bigeyeone]

Hedge fund boss: Bitcoin over gold? Are you kidding?

Hedge fund manager Paul Singer is "shocked" by Bitcoin's rise, especially given gold's fall.

"There is no more reason to believe that bitcoin will stand the test of time than that governments will protect the value of government-created money, although bitcoin is newer and we always look at babies with hope," Singer wrote in a letter to investors of his $23.3 billion Elliott Management on Jan. 27.

"If you want an alternative currency, check out gold. It has stood the test of thousands of years as a store of value and medium of exchange," Singer added.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2014/02/01/cnbc-bitcoin-gold/5038763/

Gold as a alternative currency, well good luck on that one, ever bought something with gold ? ever bought something with gold online ?

Gold is an excellent store of value but really sucks bad as a currency and that is why it has been replaced a long time ago with paper, you just don't carry gold around to pay for stuff, much too risky and as a merchant you just dont except gold as payment either, you need a lot of expertise to determine whether the gold is real or not and how much gold exactly of what purity your customer is offering you, and even if you have the expertise it consumes a lot of time to check all this, chances of getting conned are just too big. No gold really sucks bad as a currency.


Another quote from the article that was not in the OP:

"Better yet, it is not just a computer entry in the ether somewhere, and it is currently available at a good price. Bitcoin and its relatives represent an understandable impulse (anti-big-government, pro-freedom, pro-modernity), but we do not see how it actually survives. At least with gold you have to work really hard to dig the stuff up."

Right and with bitcoin you don't ? Think right now it cost more to dig the bitcoin up then it is worth at current market prices, this guy just demonstrated he really has no clue about bitcoin

[franky1]

gold as the alternative?
so we know you cant simply swap gold for pizza, electronics or anything in a retail store. so thats minus one point as a "currency"
now lets think about using gold to send funds abroad

so i go to a gold store, with $1000 that i want to send to a different country for relatives to cash-in and pay bills.

1. prices are 5% above spot at the local venue (kinda like bitcoins at times)
2. car fuel to go from home, to the local venue and then to a post office/delivery company, then back home, thats not free
3. i now have to package it up (small cardboard box, protective box filling) thats not free
4. postal charge, insurance. thats not free
5. customs charge for the relatives to receive. thats not free
6. car fuel costs for relatives to go to their local venue to sell the gold back into their fiat
7. the local gold venue wants to make some profit, thus he offers to buy the gold at 5% under spot price (kinda like bitcoins at times)

so with all that the amount the relatives gets is well under $900, and i would have paid well over $1000 after costs included. ontop of this the delivery time would be unhelpful in an emergency.

so gold seems useless at this task.

so where does gold get to be a currency?? i treat it as a commodity/product

[EchoingUprise]

so where does gold get to be a currency?? i treat it as a commodity/product

Gold is very much is a commodity. It is similar to bitcoin in the fact it only has value because we put value onto it. Bitcoin has much more uses in a modern world, but I can see why some people will choose gold over bitcoin. Gold is a tangible item, while bitcoin only exists in the digital world. That scares off a lot of people.

[Lethn]

I personally don't like gold because it's actually fairly abundant with limited usefulness... much of it is held in big vaults by large governments. Silver is more useful and less abundant and I prefer that. Plus lower price is easier to barter with 90% US circulated silver dimes for example.  

What the gold/silver bugs fail to realise is that also you have plenty of undiscovered precious metals out there in the universe, you have asteroids with trillions worth of precious metals loaded into them, once we discover how to bring that back to Earth its all over and they'll have to find something else that has scarcity, this is why I think cryptocurrencies do actually make sense, even if the scarcity is artificial, it's absolute and in the developers best interest to keep it that way, they follow a strict set of logic, whereas precious metals don't.

There's also the issue of transportation and transaction fees etc. that cryptocurrencies address, but this is something that has been discussed to death and is only asked about by people who haven't done their research beforehand, I respect the position of using precious metals as currency but I think it's foolish to completely dismiss cryptocurrencies, there are too many benefits involved with adopting them, I don't see why we can't use both.

[raskul]

some people will always be stuck in the 'it's not physically real' argument. and they still will be, even when their pensions have 'btc loyalty points' included

 

[ijphlrnxewho]

I never understood economists view of Bitcoin.

"Economists" are puppets bought and paid for by the 13 Terrorist European Bloodlines of the Terrorist organization Illuminati. They currently control the scam U.S. currency.

Some high net worth "Economists" are the children of the 13 Terrorist European Bloodlines of the Terrorist organization Illuminati.

Now you know the truth.

[corebob]

I never understood economists view of Bitcoin.

Gold is completely useless to me. I can't buy anything with gold. Nobody accepts it as payment.
They also use the word bubble a lot. Apparently they don't see the difference of bitcoins and the price of bitcoins.
The price of bitcoins can be a bubble. The technology behind bitcoin can not.

I also think they underestimate how fed up people are with government controlled currencies. They certainly did a controlled dive into the financial crisis.
Same with so called trusted services. If a service is "trusted", it has backdoors. People are not the horde of sheep they thought they were, and now they act surprised.

Gold has an intrinsic value beyond just being relatively rare and pretty to look at. Its industrial value as a crucial element of electronics, sensitive circuits, and other modern innovations give it a values above and beyond that of a mere luxury item.

Same goes for diamonds, although many people are only aware of the 'luxury item' aspect of it - some of the initial designs for mirrors and equipments in the SDI research (defunct, but still produced numerous branching off topics of research that benefited us later on - that's how scientific innovations work) included natural and artificial diamond as a component.

Bitcoin's 'intrinsic' value depends entirely upon its decentralization, security, ease of usage and ability to more easily reach people.

However, you can see how each and every one of those ideals (backed by technical aspects of bitcoin itself) is meeting obstacles every step of the way.

Is the crypto community dealing with them and advancing crypto in a positive way? No.

Instead, we see bitching and moaning about the 'rah rah rah fite da powa' bullshit that alienates many if only by their sheer infantile mentality and shallow motivations behind their complaints.

There's a reason why even someone like this hedgefund boss has an edge over your average bitcoiners. To the common public, crypto participant is a daydreaming ne'er to do well sitting in front of his computer with delusions of hitting it big someday.

If you want crypto to actually grow, start acting professional.

TLDR - check yourselves.

You may have some points but the way I see it bitcoin doesn't need intrinsic value. That's a problem that doesn't need solving.

Also, the adoption bitcoin has seen in countries like Argentina, Cyprus, Spain, Iceland etc. is not based on an attempt to be professional. They need to bypass corrupt politicians and lobbyists. Iceland is doing better that they have in a long time btw.

Serving US interests abroad has done a lot of damage to these countries over the last decades.

The only daydreaming I see is those who believed in economical growth as if it was God himself, and still do.