$5M in cost to move $12B in value and 3 years to complete. Needless to say this would have to cost $5-$10 in Bitcoin and taken 10 minutes. Also, people talk about the volatility of bitcoin but gold can drop or rise a lot over 3 years. Just look at a gold chart from the 80's. This delay can have huge implications for a country that needs its funds
This is a feature of physical assets, not a bug. Relatively difficult to move also means it's difficult to steal or destroy. Note that very few physical assets (diamonds, some rare works of art maybe) have anywhere near the portability and value-by-weight of gold.
I would say you are correct in some instances, but in others the speed and ease of transfer would be a feature. Its on a case by case basis. Some large institutions like CBs, Governments or large pensions might not be comfortable with fast transfers and ease of hacking, but some might need that portability (investment funds), etc. But what is interesting to me is that because Bitcoin is programmable money, you can actually program difficulty of transfer. You can lock Bitcoin on the blockchain until a certain date (also, multisig can help in that), its not as a great a system beause during the process of locking, the hacking could occur. Also, it takes huge balls to lock so much money where one character wrong and the funds could be lost But Ethereum is different in this regard, particularly when it comes to the concept of social recovery wallets as outlined by Vitalik https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html To me this is a brillant idea and it makes the whole issue of hacking and loss of keys a thing of the past to a huge extent. A large institution would be able to program their ETH (or wrapped Bitcoin, BTC tokens on ETH) to have 7 social recovery guardians with a 6 month vault lock before a transaction would go through. Guardians would have 6 months (or whatever amount of time they wish) to reverse any hacking transaction. That's pretty much the best of both worlds
I would also note that because you can wrap any real world asset into a token in ETH (as its happening right now with gold through Pax Gold), any asset can be programmable to have the portability that the holder desires. Stock shares, diamonds, pieces of art, etc. They can be locked for a long-time with social recovery wallets or they can have access to 24/7 liquidity and fast transactions. We are still early in this process but I believe that once people realize how secure large well-designed blockchains are a lot of things will be tokenized
Also what's to stop Central banks from creating a new block chain and declaring all other blockchains illegal and transfers can no longer be done with other cryptos ie BTC etc.. There is one gold, but there are many blockchains and todays blockchain might not exist in 10 years but gold will still be there.
Physical asset is different with digital asset, much more volume shipping cost more expensive, Bitcoin as a digital asset, transfer costs lower than physical gold, but vulnerable Bitcoin I think if hacked and or losing the private key.
How is this relevant? What is the point of your post? You are comparing a physical asset (Gold) to something digital.
Bitcoin is not an asset. There is nothing tangible in regards to Bitcoin nor does it expel any form of value other than what people agree to giving it a value today. It is not unique. It is a mathematical function constructed into a blockchain ledger. The problem is people could decide on a new blockchain ledger and abandon the original one etc.. to infinity. Unlike Gold which cannot be created out of thin air (ie transmutation of other elements without extreme expense) Bitcoin is not an asset has no tangible value. even Gold has value in Jewelry and electronics etc. The biggest risk with bitcoin is banks could decide to flip the switch and no more BTC to USD convertibility.
Why did you pick BTC instead of let's say Nano? If you wanted to make a point, pick the best technology available not the obsolete one.