The most persuasive anti-gold argument I’ve come up with goes like this:

Gold had already failed as money during the gold standard. Had gold worked, there wouldn’t have been a “standard” at all. People would have just used gold instead of bank notes.

Why did gold fail? Gold failed in the age of the telegraph and railroad because it wasn’t transmissible. It was too expensive to send coast-to-coast. Too valuable to spend in small amounts.

Here in the 21st century, the conditions that led to golds failure in the 19th century are even more pronounced. You can’t send gold over the Internet.

#Bitcoin is better than gold in every technical dimension. It is Internet native. Its supply is fixed. There are no asteroids filled with Bitcoin. It settles globally every 10 minutes. You can store any amount on an index card, or in your head if you have to. It cannot be seized. It cannot be censored.

Rock lost to paper 300 years ago. It has zero chance of being money ever again.

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Yes, a typical gold bug fallacy: Gold is valuable because it is used in electronics. Bitcoin cannot be used in the manufacture of electronic microchips, therefore Bitcoin can't be valuable.

Meanwhile, people used gold as money thousands of years ago. Apparently the ancient Egyptians used gold to manufacture their hi-fi stereo equipment, computer chips, and RADAR circuitry -- if you're dumb enough to believe gold bug fallacies.

It's a variant on the "intrinsic value" fallacy.

You see, the whole idea of money is to use something with little or no intrinsic value as a general purpose, general public "IOU" to facilitate commerce by freeing us from being forced to use barter and/or trust people we don't really know. Money is not supposed to have 'intrinsic value' or 'utility'.

What the gold bugs are doing:

• ⁠Start with gold. Create a bullshit definition: "Money is gold."

• ⁠Find an attribute which gold has, but Bitcoin lacks: You can roll gold into thin foil and line space suits with it; you can't line space suits with Bitcoin. Therefore (bogus conclusion): Bitcoin can't be money.

They start with a false premise, then use it to reach bullshit conclusions.

The truth is: Gold used to be the superior form of money because it is portable, durable, divisible, fungible, recognizable, and scarce.

Bitcoin has all of those same properties.

Gold has significant problems which caused people to stop using physical gold as money:

• ⁠Expensive to store securely

• ⁠Slow and Very Expensive to transport securely

• ⁠Gold coated tungsten in circulation (which requires special equipment and knowledge to detect)

• ⁠Not appropriate for small purchases

Bitcoin is not expensive to store securely.

Bitcoin is sent "instantly" over the Internet, inexpensively.

Detecting fake Bitcoin is trivial.

One Bitcoin is already divisible into 100 million sats; small purchases are not a problem - especially with 2nd layer solutions such as the Lightning Network.

Gold was replaced by gold-backed bank notes which were replaced by fiat currency which is being replaced by Bitcoin.

Gold was two forms of money ago.

Bitcoin is the new superior form of money.

I’m going to steal this next time someone asks me about going back to gold. Thanks Jimbo!🙏