I just finished reading through this thread, and I am not exactly sure where to start since surely as several members already mentioned, the bitcoin versus gold question has gone through several threads, and frequently ends up getting thrown into almost any thread in which the measuring of bitcoin's value versus price performance versus inevitability might be called into question.
Surely members here are going to be biased towards bitcoin, yet I was still surprised that there were so many members seeming to not really seeming to know the difference between bitcoin and gold sufficiently enough to articulate why the question of bitcoin versus gold is not merely some kind of a toss up in terms of advantages/disadvantages of each, even though surely we could assess almost any comparative investment in that kind of a way to suggest advantages/disadvantages of each.
So maybe a starting assessment might amount to what would be the purpose of investing into bitcoin as compared with gold, if there might be some question about whether bitcoin might be a hedge against dollar/fiat - based systems, so a kind of sound money, yet we should also be able to appreciate that largely bitcoin has been eating gold's lunch in the past 15-ish years, even though bitcoin really did not get much of any kind of a price discovery until it first having a price around 14 years ago.
So surely in some sense bitcoin has a bit of an unfair advantage over gold in the price discovery department since bitcoin happens to be so early in its adoption levels, so yeah, as some other members mentioned gold has had thousands of years of adoption, and bitcoin maybe only has around 1% of the world's adoption, even though maybe there is a question regarding the extent to which the whole of the world's population will end up adopting gold in one way or another, so even indirect involvement in bitcoin could end up affecting various monetary systems, yet there are also some technological barriers to adoption too, whether bitcoin is being used directly by people or if bitcoin might be merely bing used in certain ways behind various financial systems that come into being in the coming years.
Some members in this thread have mentioned gold's market cap being in the ballpark of $16 trillion and bitcoin's market cap being in the ballpark of $1.1 trillion which truly shows that bitcoin is currently priced at around 1/15th the size of gold...and if we look at various macro value systems (such as in what kinds of assets/currencies/monetary instruments value is currently stored in the world), we may well be able to appreciate that bitcoin's actual value is likely around 1,000x or greater than gold in terms of various monetary properties that had also been mentioned in this thread, which are verifiability, recognizability, durability, divisibility, scarcity, transportability, fungibility and perhaps even things like costs of storage and/or security and there may well be .
Whether bitcoin's price has to go up or gold's price has to come down in order to meet relative expected future fair values could take 50-200 years to work out the reaching of these fair values, so in the meantime, it seem that bitcoin is going to continue to eat gold's lunch unless some of the value assessment in regards to bitcoin's comparative value might be mistakenly measured.
Think about the whole matter in terms of where the total of the world's monetary value is currently being held in currencies, assets, properties, stocks, bonds, commodities, derivative products, art and collectables, and surely some of the representations of value is efficient and effectively representing value, but frequently these days a lot of premium value is held in a lot of items based on debasement of money and various kinds of debt instruments and debt relationships.
Gold has not historically backed the extra premium values of where value is held based on various aspects of gold's own inefficiencies, including the cumbersome nature of it's physicality, so even if we might not agree upon bitcoin's ability to back the various premium values in terms of bitcoin being a more efficient store of value, there still might be some agreement that bitcoin might be able to continue to absorb some of that value - in regards to Gresham law type principles, and even if it might not reach 1,000x gold's market cap, we might be able to agree that bitcoin is likely worth more than 1/15th of gold's market cap, and if you cannot agree, then you have a right to put your value wherever you like, even if bitcoin continues to take that value away from gold since more and more people are recognizing bitcoin as amongst the best places to hold value, if not the best currently available.
The Bitcoin vs Gold debate is more like the Ronaldo vs Messi one. It has enthusiastic fanatics on both sides, so at the end of the day, you just follow your gut.
You are going to have fun staying poor if you believe that the debate between bitcoin's value versus gold's value is that much of a coin toss. Yeah, sure there are folks in each camp, but that does not mean that the gold farts are actually understanding bitcoin well enough in order to understand and appreciate how gold has been taking market share from gold and likely going to continue to do so, since bitcoin is ultimately so much better than gold, but it still takes a while for value to continue to flow into bitcoin.
If you are purely into investment and look at the price growth of Bitcoin from its inception vs Gold in the same period. It's quite clear the Bitcoin beats Gold. You can look up the charts on TradingView
Yes. You recognize the trend, which is likely going to continue, even though of course, no guarantees..
Nice short and fairly basic video, though it still might be too basic in terms of capturing some of the monetary dynamics that are currently going on between bitcoin and gold..
This isn`t financial advice, just something to consider for the more Liquid parts of a portfolio, why not do both? like 60% BTC 30% cash (cash is also a position) and 10% Gold (I prefer Silver).
Just juggle the numbers around a bit to suit your own risk tollerance.
Of course, anyone starting to invest, might ONLY start out with cash and then add one investment at a time, so then there can be a question when it becomes necessary to diversify beyond just one investment, for example starting out with bitcoin and cash.
So if a person starts out with bitcoin and cash, then it could take a few years before the bitcoin investment might start to add up to something that is necessary to diversify beyond the two starting assets... and so the cash component would usually also include various kinds of back up funds such as an emergency fund, reserves and float, and so the back up funds and the bitcoin investment size could grow at the same time, even to have 3-6 months of expenses that are in the backup funds and an equivalent amount in bitcoin. If a guy is building up these funds at only 10% of his income, it could take 5-10 years just to reach the above described levels.
Of course if someone is coming into bitcoin and they already have savings and backup funds, and other investments, then they are starting from a different (and more advanced place), but I doubt that it is even accurate to presume very many folks to already have good investment practices (and cashflow management practices) prior to coming to bitcoin, so it seems a bit presumptuous also to presume that anyone needs to start out their investment in a diversified way unless they already have investments, then by definition they are more diversified than the normal beginner investor.. and I am more likely to presume that and overwhelming majority of folks are under invested and under savings rather than presuming that they are starting with much of anything.
If you are not starting with anything, then there is no need to start with both bitcoin and gold, yet if you are starting with something then what you already have might affect whether you might be ready to add both gold and bitcoin, and surely if you are ONLY able to add one, then why be fucking around with shitty ass and inferior gold unless you have some already existing investment into it or knowledge about it, and even then, it seems like a dumb place to invest as compared to bitcoin... but yeah, if you cannot resist investing into gold, then you would have to figure out your allocation.. probably no more than 5% the size of your bitcoin, but hey whatever guys can do what they like, if they believe that there might be some justification to invest much if anything into gold.
These are all different asset classes and the wise thing to do is to keep all types of assets classes in your folio and give them weightage as per your choice.
Traditional assets, precious metals, bonds, crypto can all be part of it. Dont go all in on one of them.
I don't see why there is any need to invest into anything beyond just bitcoin and cash when first starting out , and it could take a few years before your investment portfolio is big enough to start to add other assets.
Traditional assets of differing classes would usually be described as stocks, bonds, properties, commodities and cash/cash equivalents.
It would also be dumb to include crypto into any supposed attempt to diversify assets - unless you limited any crypto to less than 10% of the size of your bitcoin holdings, and perhaps only after you built the bitcoin portion.. but crypto and shitcoins are already correlated to bitcoin, so there is no use diversifying into them, unless you are a gambler and you cannot resist gambling and so you want some gambling fix.
I still don't see why there would be any presumption to diversify, unless you are already starting out with various assets in your investment portfolio, and if that is the case, the size of your bitcoin position would first be developed in accordance with whatever other assets that you have in your investment portfolio and of course, in accordance with your
9 individual factors, which is the case that you need to account for your 9 individual factors no matter if you are a beginner investor or if you already have some investments/savings.
Gold has managed to deliver approximate 30 percent adjusted returns over the past decade, which is just 2 percent on an annualized basis.
Which largely means that gold has barely even kept up with inflation (or the debasement of the dollar), and yeah in the future gold might do better, but I have my doubts.
Even if we were to strike bitcoin's first few years as being unfair and maybe start out with bitcoin at $1,000-ish (either starting in 2013 or maybe we could start from late 2016/early 2017 when bitcoin was around $1,000, so then we see that bitcoin has gotten right around a 60x price appreciation during that time.
The future is not known, yet there is no real evidence that the strength of bitcoin's investment thesis is getting any weaker against gold in the past 7-11 years, and surely the evidence seems to be getting stronger, including if we consider the ongoing building of bitcoin's various network effects (as
outlined by Trace Mayer - specifically looking at increasing financialization through ETF spot products, and I am not even claiming that the ETF spot products are not attempting to manipulate Bitcoin in the process of their ways of holding bitcoin and/or the extent to which they maintain enough of a backing of whatever BTC they are supposedly representing by the ETF shares that they issue).
If I had to choose only 1 of the 2, I would also choose bitcoin because it offers more essential use cases for me and offers much better returns than gold. Between gold and bitcoin, I think bitcoin is much better for my needs but I don't think it's a bad idea for someone to choose gold and it depends on their needs.
That seems like a silly proposition to suggest that you would have to choose one or another, even though even if there is a choice, I see little to no reason to own any gold, especially since bitcoin serves the same role.. and yeah, I suppose if push comes to shove, then maybe there might be some value in keeping some gold coins in case of an Armageddon.. but even that seems a bit silly.. but there are folks who are preppers who are preparing for Armageddon scenarios, so a bit of gold might fit in that... but still would not justify more than a few percentage points the size of the bitcoin holdings, since any of our preparations should not go beyond the likelihood of such a thing happening.. maybe 1% odds, and yeah after March2020, maybe the odds have gone up, but are the odds of Armageddon greater than 10% even from the greatest of doomer/gloomers?. ..
But what evidence do you have that gold mining is getting easier and what evidence does gold no longer have to be scarce? Because just looking at gold's chart, it's not growing as fast as bitcoin but it's clearly still growing steadily every year, which shows that demand is still higher than supply. Furthermore, gold is used in many different industries, not just as a storage asset, so I don't think there will be an oversupply of gold as you said.
According to some news I know, there is not even enough gold for the Chinese and Russian governments to buy, and the US is the country that holds the most gold in the world. Why don't they compete to buy bitcoin but instead compete to buy and store gold?
https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/international/chinas-central-bank-adds-more-gold-its-reserves-april
Surely in recent times, nations are likely increasingly considering the possibility of adding bitcoin to their various kinds of reserves, and the fact that they are hesitant likely shows how early we continue to be in how bitcoin factors into political consciousness, even though so many folks are getting surprised about how much it had been raised in some of the latest of political talking points even from presidential candidates.
Bitcoin is still very young. How many people truly understand what Bitcoin is?
Bitcoin is still very young because it is now in a perfect position compared to gold. Whether you know it or not, this Bitcoin investment is increasing day by day. Primarily, the youth are investing more here. The mindset of the youth has become such that they will continue to invest even if they have something. With day-by-day interest in technology, youngsters are getting more and more addicted to Bitcoin and will be more in future.
Probably even 80% of the people on this forum can't understand Bitcoin, and some have been in the space for years. Bitcoin is a complete paradigm shift, and it will take time for people to grasp what it is.
On the other hand, you said that 80% of people in this forum don't understand anything about Bitcoin. I couldn't agree with this because people who come to this forum are new, but after coming here, they get a good idea about Bitcoin. If they need help understanding, they ask questions in the Bitcoin discussion from here. Others explain them by giving good answers, and here you say 80% of people in the forum need help understanding Bitcoin. Most people in this forum know about Bitcoin.
As I mentioned earlier, harder forms of money always win everyone wants hard money. no one wants to lose. Eventually, everyone will own Bitcoin and will acquire it at the price they deserve.
Yes, but it is true that it will take a lot of time to learn about Bitcoin. It is not possible to learn about Bitcoin in such a short time. It needs a lot of analysis and research. Still, I don't know if he will know fully, but he will understand if he can do it with time.
Even though you are quibbling with BitGoba in regards to how widespread bitcoin knowledge is, there is probably quite a bit of truth that even a lot of members of this forum are pretty weakly informed about bitcoin besides considering bitcoin as a kind of number go up technology or that bitcoin is somehow related to crypto (one of the various crypto options), so yeah, it could well be part of the reason that the world's population is probably ONLY around 1% invested into bitcoin, and perhaps even less or unwittingly not realizing that they are way under invested into bitcoin, and so it is likely still going to take awhile for bitcoin to get into the consciousnesses of people in terms of its power and paradigm shifting dynamics in the way that value is stored, transmitted and empowering to individuals to hold value and information in bitcoin in self-sovereign ways that are ongoingly under attack too by various government and financial institutions that don't want people to be able to hold their own bitcoin and to be able directly transact with it. A lot more obstacles in terms of transacting value directly between individuals using gold as compared with bitcoin.. but still bitcoin systems are in the process of ongoingly being worked upon and even attacked.
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I agree with you about the first advantage you point out and that would make bitcoin more accessible to people than any other investment. But I think bitcoin's volatility can also be an advantage and it can also be a disadvantage, and it depends on each person's preferences. Because there are many people who do not invest in bitcoin because they are scared and feel insecure about bitcoin's volatility, not everyone enjoys the roller coaster ride like we do.
Volatility is generally in the upwards direction with bitcoin, so yeah there could be folks who are not able to figure out a way to invest into bitcoin for 4-10 years or longer., so they get caught up upon short term thinking about bitcoin rather than figuring out a way to invest a reasonable amount that is based on their discretionary income.. and yeah another problem is that people are not used to investing or figuring out ways to make sure that they have actual discretionary income that they can invest for 4-10 years or longer.
There have been many comparisons between gold and bitcoin to find out which investment asset is the best but in my opinion, both are good and have different pros and cons. Which asset is better depends on each person's preferences and we cannot impose our thoughts on others.
They might both have pros and cons, but it would be stupid to try to act like gold is even close to being equal to bitcoin in terms of the strength of their respective investment theses, but hey whatever, you do what you like if you want to believe that the comparison between bitcoin and gold is more or less a coin toss.
Guys I dont know what to do, should I invest in Gold or Bitcoin. Gold is more stable I know. But the bitcoin development is crazyy, imagine if you have bought it before 20 years...
If you are afraid, why not divide the money and do it half-half. Diversification of investment is the best thing, Gold might be less attractive with profits but Bitcoin isn't perfect too especially when you buy it at the top, you will need to wait for years probably in another cycle before you can exit or break even on your investment and if the market is bullish, you can then make more profits by power virtual of holding but you never can tell what Gold might turn later.
That sounds really dumb to me, to just put half into each... but I suppose if you don't know what you are investing into, then you may well end up making those kinds of seemingly ill-thought-out decisions.
Another thing you should know is that Bitcoin really need to make $120k before you will make 2x of your investment. Bitcoin might also be slow like Gold who knows unless you have a huge investment to make. I mean you will only make $100 on your $100 dollar investment by the time Bitcoin achieve $120k, $1k for $1k investment, $10k for $10k investment, hope you understand my points.
You are thinking that bitcoin's current market value limits its upside potential and potentially considering that gold might have similar kinds of odds as bitcoin in terms of going up in price based on a seemingly bias towards unit values of bitcoin $60k sounds a lot to you so then $120k sounds like a lot too.
You seem a bit lost, and you might need to consider bitcoin in terms of market cap rather than getting caught up in regards to its unit value.
Perhaps you also might be helped by considering bitcoin in terms of satoshis rather than bitcoin.. but hey whatever, you are not the first person who thought that bitcoin's upside potential was limited, and the same kinds of talking points were made during the 2015/2016 period when there were thoughts about $1k to $5k being bitcoin's upper-side price potentials.
I am not really wanting to try to persuade you if you cannot see it, but if we think about bitcoin as having about a $1.1 trillion market cap, then we can consider how large of a market cap it might get easily and how much of a market cap might be difficult for it to achieve. Another issue with bitcoin is that it likely has way less actual bitcoin than what is represented by the market cap due to the lost coins, but at the same time, we likely continue to have a decent amount of ongoing shenanigans with third party custodians claiming to have more coins that they do (and that is very risky for those 3rd party custodians if they get caught in that kind of a situation). Value is likely held in around $900 trillion worth of various instruments, currencies, properties, assets, bonds, derivatives, or maybe even close to $1 quadrillion in today's dollars.. and so then my own number only brings us 900x to 1,000x of today's prices.. but bitcoin is likely contributing to the creation of more value too, just like other paradigm shifting dynamics in the world increased the possible value in the world that came from improved transportation, electricity, gun powder, steel, and other paradigm shifting inventions/discoveries. Bitcoin seems to be one of those paradigm-shifting inventions/discoveries... but hey whatever, if you believe that it is going to be difficult for bitcoin to double in price/market cap, then that's on you.
Bitcoin is the best investment if you have to invest at this time because Bitcoin is going dip now. But I think that for some time bitcoin is best, people get little benefit by investing in gold. But Bitcoin is the best to get more profit, but if you invest now in this dip market then you can get one to two times profit in just few days.
But if you want to earn long term by investing in gold then it will never be possible, because it is possible to get more benefits by investing in Bitcoin only.
Between bitcoin and gold I will choose bitcoin because if you invest in bitcoin at the right time and wait you can get multiple profit. But I don't have much idea about how much profit you can get by investing in gold so I favor bitcoin to invest. But If someone thinks to invest in Bitcoin for a short period of time, it can be a big fool for him. To invest in gold, we need to think a lot before investing. Because investing in gold cannot be sold at any time and there are many difficulties. I think there may be. If we invest in Bitcoin, we can sell at any time and enjoy many benefits.
Sure. Ways to get in and out of an investment would be important, so if someone is already used to investing in gold, then he knows where he can buy it and sell it, but even the verification process for gold seems problematic in the event that any of us might be wanting to deal with physical gold, and even if we have one or two places that we can buy/sell gold in person, if those places don't want to deal with you during a time that you would like to buy/sell your gold, then it seems difficult to help folks into becoming comfortable transacting in gold.
Bitcoin seems easier to get in and out of it, even though surely there are many of us in bitcoin who would like to have more face to face options to transact, yet also part of the tax treatment of bitcoin can cause some disincentives to transact but also the number go up technology will sometimes cause some folks to not want to sell, even though there might be some folks willing to receive bitcoin, but more devopment will also help in bitcoin in terms of potentially having more folks willing to transact in bitcoin, yet I suspect that many places are no where to even close to as open about being able to transact in bitcoin as El Salvador, so it could take quite a bit of time for less hostility to develop.. so there could be questions about those abilities to get in and out of bitcoin and how much KYC might also be involved when bitcoin does not natively require any KYC beyond just having compatible onchain wallets or perhaps compatible lighting wallets.
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I am with you halfway, and as things unfold between Bitcoin and Gold, I think it's no longer appropriate to be using some certainty remarks because no one knows what will happen. In the next 10 years, what if Bitcoin is still at $65,000, what would you do? I think it's time we accept the reality of the crypto market. Now that Bitcoin is in the mainstream of the financial market where institutions have a sizable holding, it will behave more like a sane market unlike the old times when it could be moving more than 20 times in just 2 years, those movements are crazy, they are no more feasible.
In terms of returns: gold is thousands of years old and it took hundreds of years to reach the level of stability it has today. Meanwhile, bitcoin is only 15 years old and adoption has yet to take place worldwide so it is too early to say that it will enter a period of gold-like stability. Not to mention, look at gold's capitalization of more than 16 trillion while bitcoin is just over 1 trillion, it is still too small or nothing compared to gold. That would make it considered a higher-risk asset, but its youth and smallness also give it room to grow stronger.
Bitcoin is not yet the main trend of the financial market, how can an asset with a small capitalization and not yet adopted worldwide become the main trend of the world financial market?
At least market cap is the more appropriate measurement, and surely it could take some time for more and more normies to begin to recognize and appreciate bitcoin as the superior place to put value, so in accordance with Gresham's law, more and more value will continue to flow into bitcoin, as compared to other kinds of currencies and/or other kinds of assets. So you might be correct that more value has to flow into bitcoin to contribute towards bitcoin becoming more and more recognized, yet we already have institutions and/or governments putting $100s of millions into bitcoin or taking out $100s of millions from bitcoin, sometimes on a daily basis, so there is ability to move large chunks of value in and out of bitcoin in short term ways and still not move the BTC price very much - not that we always know which buys and/or which sells are contributing towards BTC price moves and while at the same time, sometimes witnessing a large variety of theories in terms of who might be buying and/or who might be selling.
