Even worse than that. You are not allowed to re-melt your piece of gold if that item has a serial number on it.

Basically most smiths run an official registry. Even though a gold bullion is yours, most countries will forbid you from melting it into something else and destroying serial number in process, just like even if you own your house you cannot set it on fire. There are penalties including jail time. Its irrelevant if you put same serial number back on remelted PM.

Really? Wow.

Do you have some links for this? I did not know that and I'm not sure why would you get jail time for that.

I mean, what is the rationale? Is it about somehow preventing transfer from a legal market to an unregulated one?

I get that you can't mint your own gold coins or bars, but why not melt them? I'm very intrigued by this.

You would probably lose value by melting minted gold bullion anyway. It would effectively convert a standardised unit of value into black market gold.

No you won't lose value. You make up by selling more of a smaller portion as smaller gold is rarely sold on exact ticker value.

It is much easier and faster to sell 10 x 100g tabs than 1 x 1kg.

But theres a cost in re-minting the gold into a bullion, which if its the way of consumption that takes more demand it would end up costing more.

Its obvious whatever that such rules can hardly be enforced.

Sidestory: Argentina had an issue with inflation making coins worth less than their metal, and the bus lines (which were coin operated) turned out to be hoarding coins for reselling.

Bullshit

gold is a precious metal.

bitcoin is a text file.

Bitcoin is a share of a conversion from electricity to waste heat.

gold is a share of a conversion of energy to dug up earth, and sometimes nasty mercury tailings.

Gold actually has practical applications. Just go to wikipedia and find out what part of the CPU of the computer you are using to write your comment upon is made of.

The price of gold doesn't come from it's practical applications, so that's hardly relevant. If gold were no longer hoarded by speculators as a store of value, its price would plummet massively as the practical application demands simply couldn't maintain its current speculative value.

Bitcoin has practical applications as well, on the Internet as peer to peer cash. But like gold, it's value comes largely from speculators, not its practical applications.

Which ceases to exist entirely after a mega-solar-flare.

Gold persists.

If the mega solar flare is mega enough you might get a few extra gold atoms. Think of the inflation!

Unless it also disables the security systems on your gold storage or erases your GLD shares or we forget we'd all agreed gold is valuable.

physical, bitchez!

(sorry, spend too much time on zerohedge...)

If there's a solar flare big enough to destroy every computer on earth, you won't have a chance to care about gold in the aftermath.

So is your bank account.

a property ownership is also a text file

Ehhh, I call BS. If for some reason all of a cities property records were lost, they would rebuild them via community testimony and consensus at worst case. Which clearly demonstrates it works in the opposite direction of what you are implying. Also property ownership tends to have inherit utility, something bit coin does not.

Bitcoin has inherit utility in allowing immutable and globally accessible data storage, people assign the rest of the value to it. Just like property, except if people with bigger guns come it doesn't matter as it will become theirs if they want

It's also highly mobile, unlike property. You can easily move more than 10k euros in BTC on a storage medium across borders without declaring anything.

A text file with the force of law behind it.

Power changes with men with gens are empowered to enforce it.