You’re revealing quite a bit about yourself. Thank god mom isn’t a user here or we’d have a problem….
I do agree that people struggle with the idea that the Bitcoin doesn't exist anywhere. They much rather hold a piece of gold. But the limitations on gold are actually quite severe. When it comes time to use in that gold you need to actually transport it. And so then what you get is a derivative of gold that is easier to transfer and then you hope that that derivative is backed by the gold. And so of course now you introduce all of the issues surrounding rehypothecation and verifiability of the actual gold. The fact that Bitcoin exists in the digital world and the fact that you want to use it in the digital world is I think a huge benefit. The fear of the network going down is I think overblown at this point. Nothing functions without the internet today. Look at what happened with the crowd strike fiasco. Hospitals had to cancel procedures and airplanes didn't fly simply because Windows machines didn't boot up properly. Even if the entire internet goes down for a few days, the blockchain will just pick up where it left off. At most the worst that happens is maybe some transactions are rolled back if there are multiple forks of the network that eventually get resolved. The thing that really opened my eyes was a bunch of videos that talked about how everything going forward is digital now. The internet couldn't be what it is if there wasn't one protocol that everybody used. Cell phone technology also wouldn't work if every country used a different network. It is true that different frequencies are necessary for different regions and so the manufacturers have to make region specific cell phones, but this is still much better than the 200 currencies or so that there are out there. The amount of friction that is introduced in order to convert between multiple currencies is so inefficient and very expensive that it's a system that needs to be fixed. Using one global currency that everyone has access to is clearly the way forward. The proof of work concept is essential. We understand how well it works for gold, so now how do we ensure that creating bitcoins is only possible in the same way. You have to put a lot of work into it in order for it to have value. But this has the dual purpose of protecting the network. When you learn that nobody can source enough hardware or enough electricity to make a dent into the hash rate, you learn that this is what makes the network so secure. The fact that all of this hashing is so distributed is actually a benefit to the system. One might say that the mining pools are centralized, and I think that's true to an extent, but it's also incredibly easy to switch mining pools and I think this is happening with Ocean mining. We can also contrast this with the current system. Add up all of the resources that every bank uses and then add up all of the resources that government agencies use simply to set the interest rate. All of this is unnecessary and a huge waste. The market can set the interest rate based on what people are willing to accept for lending out Bitcoin. I am sure that more resources currently go into upholding the current financial system than all the resources used to run the Bitcoin network. You lost me with your last point about a hybrid system though. I'm not exactly sure I understand what you're getting at here.
You're arguing store of value but gold hasn't gone anywhere? So is it e-gold or not? So the immutable ledger matters more than the tangible, physical properties of gold as a store of value..
Exactly right. The immutable ledger is a kickass property. The good thing of course about gold is that if you have pure gold then you have it. But lots of people have either fake gold that they don't know, or they think they own gold because they have a piece of paper. They're also isn't a very good account of where all the gold is out there so it's difficult to verify.