This blog post made everything a lot clearer to me: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/01/04/why-you-cant...

> [...] “market cap” is a misleading and useless number. If someone bought a fraction of a bitcoin at $19,000 per BTC, that doesn’t make anyone else a “Bitcoin billionaire” whose bitcoins could be sold at $19,000 each — the total actual money recoverable from the system hasn’t gone up.

> Try realising any substantial fraction of those paper billions and watch the price crash — the actual money doesn’t exist for everyone to cash out. At some point, there will be a rush for the exits, and most can’t possibly make it out with their “gains.”

If bitcoins were tulips, and some cosmic event made them deathly radioactive tomorrow, you wouldn't find any buyer, however steep your discount. But I suppose there'll still be open "buy" orders that will buy at $5000, or $1000, etc...

There are hundreds of coins out there. 99% of them will fail. Even the 1% is a silly investment when compared to physical gold.

Yes. As I keep on saying, the fact that there are so many coins is the demonstration that cryptocurrencies are not scarce and thus are not an alternative to gold.

This is a really good point, I hadn't thought of this before. Because of how many other options there are, the "scarcity" of Bitcoin is only real if there is something that is going to prevent other cryptocurrencies from being used, or promote Bitcoin above all others. Given that Bitcoin has been demonstrated to be inferior at scale vs. some of the other options, I don't see a reason to expect that it will continue to be the most prolific in the long term. By extension, there doesn't seem to be an obvious indication that any of them will see a lot of use in the long term.

It’s especially important when you think about mainstream adoption: the assumption is that the whole world will pile on board and make the early adopters fabulously rich but it seems at least as likely that some major companies would create their own alternative – possibly using the same software — and heavily promote it through their existing merchant accounts, cards, etc. rather be than letting someone else capture that profit.

Right now, the lack of consumer demand means there’s no reason to bother but if that changes I’d be surprised if nobody tried and there’s little lock-in to prevent people from bailing to whoever gives better terms.

Can you justify that? Other than jewelery and some industrial purposes what makes gold so valuable?

Jewelry and industrial uses do define the value of gold. Gold is not valuable from just being scarce. It is valuable because it is scarce and people want to use it. The price goes down when demand for jewelry goes down and goes up when demand for jewelry goes up.

There’s been a myth created by crypto currency activists that gold is just like crypto currency in that it’s valued simply as a value store, which is incorrect. Its use as a value store increases the value, but at its core the price is still dependent on the uses of gold. Over half of gold mined is used for jewelry or industry[1]. Yes, some is kept as investment, but that investment is based on the idea that people will continue to want gold jewelry.

[1] http://www.numbersleuth.org/worlds-gold/

Are you joking?

It has thousands of years of historical backing as a value store and has many extremely important uses in society, SOME OF WHICH are social (and that's not changing anytime soon).

This is cryptocurrency: http://bitcoinist.com/ripple-co-founder-worlds-richest-perso...

Cool, I have Ripple coins now...let's just go ahead and say these are more valuable than the US dollar, because...err...someone told me it's the future! It does all these things all the currencies can't! And my neighbor just remortgaged his home to invest a few months ago and now he's got a yacht! I better do it too. I think this bubble should be called collective insanity. At least with the housing market bubble, people were investing in actual, physical assets. That was, at the very least, intellectually justifiable.

Can Neopet dollars become a global currency as well, please? I think I have an account on there from way back

Edit: I scrolled to the bottom of the article I've just linked...stumbled onto this guy: https://kwhcoin.com/the-kwh-team/

This is literally like Ocean's 11. Again, at least casino chips are physical objects

As far as I understand, currencies have value because we all agree they do (or because there is a guaranteed fixed exchange rate for some other asset that we have all agreed has value). The extent to which a currency is a good store of value will be determined, again, by how many people believe it is legitimate and continue to accept it for transactions (though fiat currencies have a wrinkle where a central bank can produce an unlimited amount. In this case, the fiat currency is a good store of value to the extent that people believe the central bank won't do this). I don't see why there is any reason to believe that a digital currency could not succeed if enough people believe it has value.

The "comparison to fiat currency" is becoming a copypasta by now. The reality of the US dollar versus a bitcoin is so outlandishly different that it is getting painful seeing these things compared together. You might not see a reason why it might not succeed, but there are several thousand plausible reasons that are not based on delusions of grandeur that many other people, many of whom are intelligent and very influential, are aware of

Gold is more valuable than cryptocurrency because 1) for a “by acclamation” store of value, the thousands of years and billions of people who recognize gold as an asset is a big advantage, and 2) you can’t make “forks” of gold unlike Bitcoin Cash, Dogecoin, etc.

What's funny about this comment is that literally every extent currency in the world is a fork of gold.

Yes, but unlike Dogecoin, those currencies have an army, a navy, and a tax collection office to give them value.

I read a comment on Reddit where some people were speculating about the future of their coin. (This is a coin with "masternodes" that vote on how to spend a discretionary mining tax.) They speculated that one day they might vote to hire mercenaries to protect the coin's value.

At the point that you need to hire mercenaries to protect your coin's value, why not just use them to rob people, or extort protection payments?

I don't know, and I'm not sure how mercenaries would affect the coin's value, but the thought is scary, and it offers a potential counterpoint to the comment about coins not having militaries giving them value.

FWIW, China was on silver

if you fork bitcoin you don't make more bitcoin, a forked bitcoin coin isn't exchangeable with the original, bitcoin value is in the community who reconize it as an asset, how you say, people recognize gold as an asset. Except history bitcoin has many other advantages to gold, and history is not that huge argument, times change.

It's hard to fake and easy to store. It is also a hard resource to extract, so it serves as its own "proof of work" in cryptocurrency terms.

To piggy back on something you said: a big issue I noticed recently is that it seems a lot of the websites people use to track this stuff have charts in <other coin> vs. BTC rather than <other coin> vs. USD (or some other established currency). As BTC goes up and down, these charts are extremely misleading due to the volatility. This dramatically pushes things into fantasy speculation land since people are valuating their speculative investments based on another very speculative investment. If BTC drops in USD price, and your altcoin of choice gains slightly vs BTC, these charts would show a "gain" when I think in reality it is still a loss.