Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Carlton Banks]

I would like to know how much gold is in private hands, for different countries. Is this known and published somewhere?

"Published" and "known" are slippery concepts when applied to gold holdings. No-one wants to tell the whole truth, and for good reasons (well, self interested reasons, namely to make any true spot price very difficult to determine)

Ha Carlton, I bet you still got some gold bars back at uncle Phil's house up in the attic or somewhere!
But yeah, it'd be interesting to know how the gold is distributed among the different status-groups of investors/companies/crime/states/etc...

I guess we will never know.

When the time comes for the fiat world to end, gold may be doing badly. I have a feeling that Bitcoin will end up as the popular scapegoat for the death of fiat, even though the minority will know that the game was over in 1971. Bitcoin will gradually smother fiat, slowly at first, then quickly (as in the famous Newton quote). The incentives all point in that direction, I think we all know the time for this idea has truly arrived. All the people holding gold will begin to dump it for Bitcoin as quietly as they can, with a probable likelihood that there's slightly more gold hidden in vaults than has been accounted for.

I'm pretty much in the cypherdoc camp on gold, the "gold is money" thing is stretching the truth a little bit. No-one accepts gold as payment just about anywhere (unless you're an Afghan druglord or an Iranian oil baron). Bitcoin is seriously rivalling gold in the area of money status; for instance, there are several places you can buy gold with bitcoin, but nowhere to buy Bitcoin with gold.

Unless you meant Uncle Phil's gold of course, which is a family secret, naturally.  

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[Erdogan]

I would like to know how much gold is in private hands, for different countries. Is this known and published somewhere?

"Published" and "known" are slippery concepts when applied to gold holdings. No-one wants to tell the whole truth, and for good reasons (well, self interested reasons, namely to make any true spot price very difficult to determine)

Ha Carlton, I bet you still got some gold bars back at uncle Phil's house up in the attic or somewhere!
But yeah, it'd be interesting to know how the gold is distributed among the different status-groups of investors/companies/crime/states/etc...

I guess we will never know.

When the time comes for the fiat world to end, gold may be doing badly. I have a feeling that Bitcoin will end up as the popular scapegoat for the death of fiat, even though the minority will know that the game was over in 1971. Bitcoin will gradually smother fiat, slowly at first, then quickly (as in the famous Newton quote). The incentives all point in that direction, I think we all know the time for this idea has truly arrived. All the people holding gold will begin to dump it for Bitcoin as quietly as they can, with a probable likelihood that there's slightly more gold hidden in vaults than has been accounted for.

I'm pretty much in the cypherdoc camp on gold, the "gold is money" thing is stretching the truth a little bit. No-one accepts gold as payment just about anywhere (unless you're an Afghan druglord or an Iranian oil baron). Bitcoin is seriously rivalling gold in the area of money status; for instance, there are several places you can buy gold with bitcoin, but nowhere to buy Bitcoin with gold.

Unless you meant Uncle Phil's gold of course, which is a family secret, naturally.  

You are probably right, but gold has a long history, so i think there will be some exchange value in gold for many years.

[cypherdoc]

I would like to know how much gold is in private hands, for different countries. Is this known and published somewhere?

"Published" and "known" are slippery concepts when applied to gold holdings. No-one wants to tell the whole truth, and for good reasons (well, self interested reasons, namely to make any true spot price very difficult to determine)

Ha Carlton, I bet you still got some gold bars back at uncle Phil's house up in the attic or somewhere!
But yeah, it'd be interesting to know how the gold is distributed among the different status-groups of investors/companies/crime/states/etc...

I guess we will never know.

isn't that the entire problem?

[Erdogan]

I would like to know how much gold is in private hands, for different countries. Is this known and published somewhere?

"Published" and "known" are slippery concepts when applied to gold holdings. No-one wants to tell the whole truth, and for good reasons (well, self interested reasons, namely to make any true spot price very difficult to determine)

Ha Carlton, I bet you still got some gold bars back at uncle Phil's house up in the attic or somewhere!
But yeah, it'd be interesting to know how the gold is distributed among the different status-groups of investors/companies/crime/states/etc...

I guess we will never know.

isn't that the entire problem?

Nah, I think money can work even if the amount is not known. Same with bitcoins. We will never know how much is saved for the long time (decennia) or how many are lost. As long as the money are sound.

[cypherdoc]

I would like to know how much gold is in private hands, for different countries. Is this known and published somewhere?

"Published" and "known" are slippery concepts when applied to gold holdings. No-one wants to tell the whole truth, and for good reasons (well, self interested reasons, namely to make any true spot price very difficult to determine)

Ha Carlton, I bet you still got some gold bars back at uncle Phil's house up in the attic or somewhere!
But yeah, it'd be interesting to know how the gold is distributed among the different status-groups of investors/companies/crime/states/etc...

I guess we will never know.

isn't that the entire problem?

Nah, I think money can work even if the amount is not known. Same with bitcoins. We will never know how much is saved for the long time (decennia) or how many are lost. As long as the money are sound.

But one money will be more sound than all others, and that is Bitcoin. If anything its supply will only go down whereas with gold you have at least 2% inflation from mining. Plus all the tungsten related counterfeits.

[Erdogan]

I would like to know how much gold is in private hands, for different countries. Is this known and published somewhere?

"Published" and "known" are slippery concepts when applied to gold holdings. No-one wants to tell the whole truth, and for good reasons (well, self interested reasons, namely to make any true spot price very difficult to determine)

Ha Carlton, I bet you still got some gold bars back at uncle Phil's house up in the attic or somewhere!
But yeah, it'd be interesting to know how the gold is distributed among the different status-groups of investors/companies/crime/states/etc...

I guess we will never know.

isn't that the entire problem?

Nah, I think money can work even if the amount is not known. Same with bitcoins. We will never know how much is saved for the long time (decennia) or how many are lost. As long as the money are sound.

But one money will be more sound than all others, and that is Bitcoin. If anything its supply will only go down whereas with gold you have at least 2% inflation from mining. Plus all the tungsten related counterfeits.

I agree. Bitcoin is the soundest. But gold is also sound, the reason is that the supply is not controlled by governments.

[cypherdoc]

I would like to know how much gold is in private hands, for different countries. Is this known and published somewhere?

"Published" and "known" are slippery concepts when applied to gold holdings. No-one wants to tell the whole truth, and for good reasons (well, self interested reasons, namely to make any true spot price very difficult to determine)

Ha Carlton, I bet you still got some gold bars back at uncle Phil's house up in the attic or somewhere!
But yeah, it'd be interesting to know how the gold is distributed among the different status-groups of investors/companies/crime/states/etc...

I guess we will never know.

isn't that the entire problem?

Nah, I think money can work even if the amount is not known. Same with bitcoins. We will never know how much is saved for the long time (decennia) or how many are lost. As long as the money are sound.

But one money will be more sound than all others, and that is Bitcoin. If anything its supply will only go down whereas with gold you have at least 2% inflation from mining. Plus all the tungsten related counterfeits.

I agree. Bitcoin is the soundest. But gold is also sound, the reason is that the supply is not controlled by governments.

depends on how you look at it.

Because anyone with large supplies has to store it at centralized locations, true supply can never be known or verified and therefore is subject to govt manipulation via gold derivatives or GLD. This is a problem gold bugs won't acknowledge.

[Erdogan]

I would like to know how much gold is in private hands, for different countries. Is this known and published somewhere?

"Published" and "known" are slippery concepts when applied to gold holdings. No-one wants to tell the whole truth, and for good reasons (well, self interested reasons, namely to make any true spot price very difficult to determine)

Ha Carlton, I bet you still got some gold bars back at uncle Phil's house up in the attic or somewhere!
But yeah, it'd be interesting to know how the gold is distributed among the different status-groups of investors/companies/crime/states/etc...

I guess we will never know.

isn't that the entire problem?

Nah, I think money can work even if the amount is not known. Same with bitcoins. We will never know how much is saved for the long time (decennia) or how many are lost. As long as the money are sound.

But one money will be more sound than all others, and that is Bitcoin. If anything its supply will only go down whereas with gold you have at least 2% inflation from mining. Plus all the tungsten related counterfeits.

I agree. Bitcoin is the soundest. But gold is also sound, the reason is that the supply is not controlled by governments.

depends on how you look at it.

Because anyone with large supplies has to store it at centralized locations, true supply can never be known or verified and therefore is subject to govt manipulation via gold derivatives or GLD. This is a problem gold bugs won't acknowledge.

I agree to that. In principle, bitcoin extensions can also be created, but yes, I hold bitcoins, not gold (not much).

[cypherdoc]

my last 3 posts, i talk about the "speculative mind" of markets:

http://www.reddit.com/user/cypherdoc2/ …

[zeetubes]

"Because anyone with large supplies has to store it at centralized locations, true supply can never be known or verified and therefore is subject to govt manipulation via gold derivatives or GLD. This is a problem gold bugs won't acknowledge. "

I think the problem of manipulation is acknowledged by gold bugs - take a look at any ZH comments thread - but the mainstream analysts (true of any market and not just gold) mainly ignore or deny it because their funding comes from analyzing the market trends and fundamentals, which in this day and age is pure BS. Once the various funds and other investment vehicles roll out in force in the bitcoin sphere, BTC may also suffer from the same fate and I'm sure there is some tweaking going on even now, especially in terms of FUD spread by various vested interests. But for now, BTC still feels like the closest thing we have to a market price primarily set by supply and demand.

[cypherdoc]

"Because anyone with large supplies has to store it at centralized locations, true supply can never be known or verified and therefore is subject to govt manipulation via gold derivatives or GLD. This is a problem gold bugs won't acknowledge. "

I think the problem of manipulation is acknowledged by gold bugs - take a look at any ZH comments thread - but the mainstream analysts (true of any market and not just gold) mainly ignore or deny it because their funding comes from analyzing the market trends and fundamentals, which in this day and age is pure BS. Once the various funds and other investment vehicles roll out in force in the bitcoin sphere, BTC may also suffer from the same fate and I'm sure there is some tweaking going on even now, especially in terms of FUD spread by various vested interests. But for now, BTC still feels like the closest thing we have to a market price primarily set by supply and demand.

yeah, I probably should have said that the gold bugs know it and complain about it all the time but fail to realize that Bitcoin is gold's Black Swan in that it performs all the functions of gold and more.

This whole dynamic interplay btwn the 2 is so fundamental and important to Bitcoins future success which is why I posted this thread in the first place, not to troll like I presented to tvbcof.

Ah, maybe for a little trolling.

[Erdogan]

I just want to remind that the rentenmark, created during the weimar hyperinflation, was peddled as stable money, and people belived it and started to hold, and the value was stabilized, even though the printing  continued.

There can never be an absolute connection between supply and value, because the tendency to hold is in the minds of everybody, and it is impossible to know.

[zeetubes]

The reason I missed the btc boat by about 18 months was that I'd become so jaded and worn out by reading the crap financial news that I totally ignored everything for a couple of years. But I used to work with crypto and I'd always had an interest in gold, and so when I finally did stumble across it, it was an immediate lust at first sight. I'm still gobsmacked at just what a brilliant innovation bitcoin is. But somehow I doubt Satoshi is ever going to get a nomination for the nobel prize in economics.

[zeetubes]

"Because anyone with large supplies has to store it at centralized locations, true supply can never be known or verified and therefore is subject to govt manipulation via gold derivatives or GLD. This is a problem gold bugs won't acknowledge. "

I think the problem of manipulation is acknowledged by gold bugs - take a look at any ZH comments thread - but the mainstream analysts (true of any market and not just gold) mainly ignore or deny it because their funding comes from analyzing the market trends and fundamentals, which in this day and age is pure BS. Once the various funds and other investment vehicles roll out in force in the bitcoin sphere, BTC may also suffer from the same fate and I'm sure there is some tweaking going on even now, especially in terms of FUD spread by various vested interests. But for now, BTC still feels like the closest thing we have to a market price primarily set by supply and demand.

yeah, I probably should have said that the gold bugs know it and complain about it all the time but fail to realize that Bitcoin is gold's Black Swan in that it performs all the functions of gold and more.

This whole dynamic interplay btwn the 2 is so fundamental and important to Bitcoins future success which is why I posted this thread in the first place, not to troll like I presented to tvbcof.

Ah, maybe for a little trolling.

A little trolling never hurt anyone. I'm on the fence about how quickly (the monetary characteristics of) gold will be subsumed/replaced by BTC. It's like living through the demise of vinyl records as CDs, and later MP3s, made their way into the world. And if you go to Japan it's amazing to see that CDs are still hugely popular. I can't remember the last time I bought a CD.

"Japan is the second-biggest music market in the world, but an unusual one where digital has barely taken hold; 80 percent of sales there are still physical CDs."

[peeveepee]

The trend for gold and bitcoin will probably reverse as bitcoin is getting regulated.

All exchanges now operate aboard due to unfavorable law, it won't be too long before all pools will face similar fate.

Losing bitcoin infrastructure in the US is a big deal as the ecology system (consumer, producer and speculator) balance is being "rocked".

[Melbustus]

From

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/liamhalligan/10978178/The-dollars-70-year-dominance-is-coming-to-an-end.html

Within a decade or so, a “reserve currency basket” may emerge, with central banks storing wealth in a mix of dollars, yuan, rupee, reals and roubles, as well as precious metals. Perhaps some kind of synthetic bundle of the world’s leading currencies will be developed, with emphasis placed, after years of western money-printing, on assets backed by commodities and other tangibles.

Using some new commodity-backed asset for CB reserves would be terrible (though I agree it might happen). There'd have to be some sort of implicit (if not explicit) redemption/convertibility for it to have any meaning, and then you're opening the door for all sorts of ugly manipulation or demand transfer to/from this new asset and the industrially useful commodities that "back" it. This has already happened with gold; ie, our electronics would be cheaper if humanity didn't still insist on paying so darn much for gold due to its history as money/financial-asset. Do we really want to introduce that dynamic into commodities that are far more industrially important (oil, copper, wheat, etc)?

No, we don't. The ideal reserve asset is scarce, like gold, but actually has zero "intrinsic" (as measured by industrial usefulness, as so many gold-bugs insist) value. Anybody know of anything scarce, fungible, transferable, recognizable, and durable, but *not* industrially useful?

[User705]

"Because anyone with large supplies has to store it at centralized locations, true supply can never be known or verified and therefore is subject to govt manipulation via gold derivatives or GLD. This is a problem gold bugs won't acknowledge. "

I think the problem of manipulation is acknowledged by gold bugs - take a look at any ZH comments thread - but the mainstream analysts (true of any market and not just gold) mainly ignore or deny it because their funding comes from analyzing the market trends and fundamentals, which in this day and age is pure BS. Once the various funds and other investment vehicles roll out in force in the bitcoin sphere, BTC may also suffer from the same fate and I'm sure there is some tweaking going on even now, especially in terms of FUD spread by various vested interests. But for now, BTC still feels like the closest thing we have to a market price primarily set by supply and demand.

yeah, I probably should have said that the gold bugs know it and complain about it all the time but fail to realize that Bitcoin is gold's Black Swan in that it performs all the functions of gold and more.

This whole dynamic interplay btwn the 2 is so fundamental and important to Bitcoins future success which is why I posted this thread in the first place, not to troll like I presented to tvbcof.

Ah, maybe for a little trolling.

A little trolling never hurt anyone. I'm on the fence about how quickly (the monetary characteristics of) gold will be subsumed/replaced by BTC. It's like living through the demise of vinyl records as CDs, and later MP3s, made their way into the world. And if you go to Japan it's amazing to see that CDs are still hugely popular. I can't remember the last time I bought a CD.

"Japan is the second-biggest music market in the world, but an unusual one where digital has barely taken hold; 80 percent of sales there are still physical CDs."

Interesting observation.  It's like the old saying that new ideas don't really assimilate it's that the people who don't believe them simply die out eventually.

[zeetubes]

"It's like the old saying that new ideas don't really assimilate it's that the people who don't believe them simply die out eventually."

Probably true. 95%+ of people stop learning in their teens, even though they carry on being educated. 95% of people are similarly scared shitless of any change, however much they think they voted for it. The other 5% are called contrarian thinkers. 95% of people probably think they belong to that 5%. But in reality they don't. Religion and politics, not to mention, global warming, low fat, high fiber  foods et al are all still around even though they're way past their due dates. That's mostly why I think gold will stick around for a while longer. But I've been wrong about more things in my life than I care to remember.

[ErisDiscordia]

"It's like the old saying that new ideas don't really assimilate it's that the people who don't believe them simply die out eventually."

Probably true. 95%+ of people stop learning in their teens, even though they carry on being educated. 95% of people are similarly scared shitless of any change, however much they think they voted for it. The other 5% are called contrarian thinkers. Neophiles

FTFY

[Erdogan]

From

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/liamhalligan/10978178/The-dollars-70-year-dominance-is-coming-to-an-end.html

Within a decade or so, a “reserve currency basket” may emerge, with central banks storing wealth in a mix of dollars, yuan, rupee, reals and roubles, as well as precious metals. Perhaps some kind of synthetic bundle of the world’s leading currencies will be developed, with emphasis placed, after years of western money-printing, on assets backed by commodities and other tangibles.

Using some new commodity-backed asset for CB reserves would be terrible (though I agree it might happen). There'd have to be some sort of implicit (if not explicit) redemption/convertibility for it to have any meaning, and then you're opening the door for all sorts of ugly manipulation or demand transfer to/from this new asset and the industrially useful commodities that "back" it. This has already happened with gold; ie, our electronics would be cheaper if humanity didn't still insist on paying so darn much for gold due to its history as money/financial-asset. Do we really want to introduce that dynamic into commodities that are far more industrially important (oil, copper, wheat, etc)?

No, we don't. The ideal reserve asset is scarce, like gold, but actually has zero "intrinsic" (as measured by industrial usefulness, as so many gold-bugs insist) value. Anybody know of anything scarce, fungible, transferable, recognizable, and durable, but *not* industrially useful?

Yep. No intrinsic value is a great advantage for bitcoin as money.