Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

This is exactly what I was talking about earlier in the thread. Crypto people bring up gold out of no where. I have never invested in gold. You are projecting the idea that I don't understand why USD and Gold are bad investments.


Why does gold have a $13tr USD market cap?

Why do governments hoard billions of dollars of gold bars in military protected bunkers?

Does it have something to do with store of value, and difficulty in debasing gold?


Yes some people like to buy gold because it seems like it may hold its value to those people. That is not a new concept that crypto invented. People bought Baseball Cards and Bennie Babies long before crypto in the hopes that those items would hold up in value.


So, I think you understand computers really well. I think you probably have a good enough understanding of investing, economics.

What I think you're missing the understanding of what money is, and the history of money. This is why gold gets brought up.

In the last some thousand years gold evolved as a world standard for trade. Why? It had some good properties; physically tough and lasting, common enough for people to find / rare enough to be difficult to debase (holds value), you can melt it and shape it (divisible), etc. Gold permeated all societies because it was the "winner" of precious metal monies, and good technology tends to spread, giving it network effects.

Your US dollars were originally just paper notes promising redemption for gold at your bank. We traded those notes around because we had enough trust in a system now for it to be convenient for us.

At some point, governments decided it wanted to they wanted more control over money/economy, and essentially forced a fiat standard on the population. This is the great monetary experiment we are living now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system

If you can contextualize what money is, the history of money dating back thousands of years, then you can start to see how crypto has a lot of advantages over metal money, as well as fiat money.


The most important money throughout history and still today is debt. "Debt the first 5000 years" is a good book on the topic. A shorter form explanation that is pretty good is "The DEBT Cycle Explained By Ray Dalio" on YouTube

Again I'm still not sure why you are trying to convince me that USD is a bad investment. I already said it was at the beginning of this thread.


Good, then you're on the path to figuring out what a better form of money could be.


Not really, I'm not looking for a new medium of exchange.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: