Quote from: RealBitcoin on August 14, 2015, 05:18:27 PM

Yea but why would you buy gold if bitcoin is a better alternative. Sure there could be some rich guys in India that dont know or dont trust bitcoin yet, but once they begin to trust bitcoin more, i`m sure bitcoin will prevail.

Not really. You have to see this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUr2E4dfs0Y to understand the culture, how they buy gold and not intend to sell it, how they see the ever-increasing price of gold, how even the poorest of the poor go out to buy 1g gold bars etc, how they dump fiat to buy gold and do not even consider that they have "spent" money because gold IS money for them, etc etc.

Bitcoin is not a real rival to gold in cultures like these (which, incidentally, has a population that EU+N.America can't match). Bitcoin is more like a facilitator of online transactions and something that gives you access to p2p banking services, without banks. If it can also be a great store of value, or even give multiple % gains, that's great.

Gold is your "savings" while bitcoin is more like your online banking.

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Since gold cant be used as a currency, i already told you that the only thing you can do is to BUY LOW & SELL HIGH (OR BUY HIGH & SELL LOW if you get suckered into the ride)

It is already used as a currency but we don't think in that way. Citizens of india often think prices or salaries in terms of gold weight, which we don't. The fiat they get is just the vehicle to acquire more gold. And they don't even plan on selling, because they know that gold (as measured in terms of their national currency and always in the long-term) is always going up, so why sell?

What we as westerners consider a given, isn't really a given for the rest of the planet, and to populations outnumbering us, and populations that have a large effect on the gold market (India and China imports are something like 2000 tons per year, when global production is like 2500 tons). Here we see a gold/silver stacker and we are like "huh?". There it's much different as to the reasons why they are buying, how they are selling and if they are selling, how they view gold in their societies etc etc. We can't really get a proper sense of the gold market if we project our own rationale into the global population, without that rationale actually being true for all.

I tend to view money in two forms:

Sound money and scam money.

Precious metals and bitcoin would definitely go in the sound money category (with the current parameters being intact - that is if a btc flaw isn't discovered tomorrow that renders it useless), while fiat goes in the scam category because it's just cotton and paper that they are printing "value" on it. They can print as much as they like - making "wealth" appear out of nowhere.

In that sense, gold and btc are complimentary and not pitted against one another. Many western gold bugs or silver bugs (which are in essence fiat bugs that have a rationale of buying low / selling high, to maximize their fiat holdings, and not the india-attitude of HODLing forever) hate btc for reasons like "if you don't have it in your hand, it's vapor", or believing there is fiat dilution in BTC that should be going only to PMs and raising PM prices, but there is an increasing number of them that realize btc can indeed be a profit hedge. If gold/silver price is manipulated and the gains aren't forthcoming, why not hedge with a little crypto that can give explosive gains? Even some shit-hit-the-fan preppers have started to realize that btc is useful for online or global transactions when the banks fail them or prevent access to banking services, while gold/silver exchange is for a more local scenario.

Eventually the role of btc will be seen for what it is and not draw the same amount of hostility from both PM crowd and fiat crowd.

Quote from: Erdogan on August 14, 2015, 06:28:16 PM

But he was wrong. It is the production cost that gravitates towards price. The value consumers allocate through the market, based on everything in the individuals' minds.

His observation isn't inaccurate per se although what causes what can be debatable in some cases.