The Case Against Gold. Bitcoin Tech Talk Issue #215

We all know the case for gold that goldbugs will tell us. Their arguments are if anything utterly predictable. Gold has been in use for thousands of years. Gold is physical. Gold has uses outside its use as money in electronics, dentistry and aeronautics. Their arguments against Bitcoin are along the same lines. Bitcoin doesn’t have the same thousand-year history as gold. Bitcoin is not physical and doesn’t have use cases outside money.

What’s interesting about all of these arguments is that they’re all about trust. The implication is that something that doesn’t have a long history is harder to trust. Same for something that’s not physical or has a use case outside money. That’s their argument and it’s an argument from human psychology than anything. Older people are more inclined to trust physical things more than digital things, older things than newer things, things with other uses than a single-purpose thing. Yet if we turn this around, goldbugs have a lot more to answer for.