.... The ESF will attempt to rig metals right up to the very last second and then suddenly silver will go from it's completely rigged price to the equivalent of hundreds of dollars an ounce with gold doing the same thing, just not anywhere near the gains of silver.
...
Cryptocurrencies are all designed to centralize, non-fungible, have built-in rent seeking middlemen, and don't remove counterparty risk. ...
Let´s assume that your theory is correct for a second. What exactly is the argument why silver will have higher gains than Gold
in this scenario? The industrial usage?
Where exactly is the counterparty risk in Bitcoin? Of course theoretically the big miners could collude to blacklist
your coins or try to double-spend, but in reality the incentive structure of the system disincentivizes fraudulent behavior.
If a miner would actually perform a fraudulent act like that the whole trust in Bitcoin would be gone and they would
be sitting on hardware and other infrastructure that is now worthless instead of making a fortune by continuing to play by
the network´s rules (and they obviously would have to write off hundreds of million of $ in investment).
This is one of the ingenious elements in Bitcoin´s design. The incentive structure ensures that
the only powers that could theoretically cheat the system stay honest.
The only counterparty risk I see is if you store your coins with an exchange or some other kind of service. But
everyone here heavily dissuades newcomers from doing this with the common slogans like "Not your private keys,
not your coins" and similar stuff. Of course some people choose to ignore this advice, but they get
Bitfinex´ed or Gox´ed sooner or later.