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One Bitcoin Is Now Worth More Than One Ounce of Gold (techcrunch.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the gold-standard dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: For the first time ever, the price of one bitcoin has surpassed the price of one ounce of gold. While today's swap can be attributed to a good day for bitcoin (up ~3%) and a bad day for gold (down ~1.3%), the big picture is that bitcoin has more than doubled in the last year (up ~185% from a year ago) while gold is essentially trading exactly at the price it was a year ago. Even though bitcoin and gold are both thought of as alternative assets, they don't usually trade in correlation. Still, it's notable that bitcoin has (at least temporally) surpassed the price of gold. Gold is quite literally the "gold standard" of alternative assets, often used by investors to hedge against potential losses in more traditional assets like real estate and the stock market.

9 of 208 comments (clear)

  1. One bitcoin is worth more than gold to idiots by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The power goes out. How much is your bitcoin worth then?

    1. Re:One bitcoin is worth more than gold to idiots by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The question wasn't, "The power goes out. Does your bitcoin still exist?".

      It was, "The power goes out. How much is your bitcoin worth then?".

      We're talking about worth here. To put it another way, value.

      The value of pretty much anything depends significantly on its usability. A lack of usability reduces value.

      A bitcoin in cold, offline storage is essentially worthless if it can't be easily and conveniently accessed (due to a lack of electricity to power the computers and networks needed to use it).

      What you're proposing is the same as encasing a gold bar in concrete, and then burying it a mile underground where it's inaccessible without a huge amount of effort to retrieve it.

      Does the gold have potential value? Sure. What's its actual value to somebody who wants to use it for commercial purposes right away, given its inaccessible state? Worthless.

      That's the point I think that the GP was trying to make, and that you (and whoever dumbly modded you up) totally missed.

      It's much easier to make bitcoin totally unusable, and hence worthless, than it is to do the same for most other currencies or currency-like commodities.

    2. Re:One bitcoin is worth more than gold to idiots by cdrudge · · Score: 5, Insightful

      How much is your gold worth when you need to send a payment half way around the world near instantly? Your gold is useless while a bitcoin could be valuable. We can come up with all sorts of arbitrary scenarios that would make bitcoins and gold either very valuable or completely worthless.

      The fact of the matter is that the inherent value of anything is exactly what someone will pay for it right then. And right now 1 bitcoin is worth more than one ounce of gold based on currently trending transaction values.

  2. No, it's not notable by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Still, it's notable that bitcoin has (at least temporally) surpassed the price of gold.

    No, that's not notable. The only notable thing is that bitcoin is at an all-time high.

    Comparing a piece of mathematical information to an arbitrary amount of an arbitrary substance is not in any way notable.

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
  3. Don't listen to the Bitcoin haters by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If you want a good laugh, go read through all the old /. articles on Bitcoin, particularly around when it was reaching $1 in value.
    So many naysayers. Well they're not laughing now!

    1. Re:Don't listen to the Bitcoin haters by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Naysayer here, still chuckling.

  4. One reason by jolyonr · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There is only one reason that bitcoin is so high in value right now, ransomware

    --


    Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
  5. Think of all the energy wasted by HuguesT · · Score: 4, Insightful

    to produce this one bitcoin.

  6. An ounce of gold is nothing by cfalcon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    > Still, it's notable that bitcoin has (at least temporally) surpassed the price of gold.

    Bullshit, it has not.

    There's a cap of 21 million bitcoins. Of this, over three quarters have already been mined. It is supposed to get progressively harder to mine bitcoins, with the intention that the huge numbers of bitcoins that are sitting fallow will eventually appreciate in value, that it will still be worth mining them even as they get harder, etc. Regardless of your views on this, or cryptocurrencies: there's only 21 million bitcoins total.

    1 bitcoin is one twenty-millionth of all bitcoins. It is about .000005% of the total blob of bitcoins that will ever be. .000005% of all the gold mined to date- which is definitely not all the gold ever- is around 300 ounces of gold. And that's a very low estimate for the total gold available- some sources have it at over ten times that in available gold. The fact that no one has it pinned down to at least a solid order of magnitude is depressing, but the point is that even the low estimates, the percentage of one bitcoin compared to all the bitcoin, versus that same percentage of gold compared to all the gold, is nowhere close in bitcoins favor.