Kashyap Sriram: Bitcoin’s trust is fleeting; gold’s timeless value anchors 7 billion people.

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Bitcoin is not digital gold. Gold is not a network asset. If you hold it, you hold it. I moved apartments recently and I simply took my gold with me.

Can’t do that with bitcoin. You need to ask “the network” to move your bitcoin from one address to another. If the network says no, you’re screwed. The miners can say no for any number of reasons:

– you used a mixer
– the address is under OFAC sanctions
– the fee is too low (sometimes, people pay up to 90% of the tx value in fees)
– the network, which only supports 7 tps, is clogged
– you got on the wrong side of a giant mining pool and they refuse to honor your transaction
– you added valuable data to your transaction and the holier-than-thou miner considers your data to be spam

A network asset only has value when the network itself is trustworthy. This is why the 2013 and 2017 bitcoin hard forks were so scary – they were make or break events for trust in the network. Right now, there’s a lot of trust in the bitcoin network. That won’t remain the case forever.

Gold is trusted by 7 billion people as a store of value. That will remain the case forever.

There is no digital gold. Just legacy tech trying to ride gold’s coattails in a last gasp for relevance.


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