Quote from: 5grainsilver on July 18, 2011, 11:11:07 PM

Quote from: MoonShadow on July 18, 2011, 09:42:30 PM

Quote from: 5grainsilver on July 18, 2011, 08:32:06 PM

They are not comparable.

Gold has industrial and aesthetic use. It has real world use outside of just being a store of value.
Bitcoin is nothing.

Gold's industrial uses are negligible as compared to it's monetary use value. Granted, if gold were the price of silver, there would be a lot of uses for it pop up, but realisticly one must consider the industrial use value and the monetary use value as independent variables. All the industrial use value of gold provides is a backstop against catastrophic monetary value collapse, which bitcoin does not have. Silver does have many industrial uses for which there is no viable alternative, which is not the case for gold's industrial uses. For example, silver is both toxic to many forms of bacteria, making it a valuable medical material; while also being fairly non-toxic to human life, contrary to almost all other heavy metals. Gold is not toxic either, but nor does it have any other chemical properties of note, since it's non reactive. This does make gold a good choice for conductive connectors, particularly in corrosive environments, but there are other solutions that exist for that.

You are correct. I think my other point is much more important though. I am referring to the fact that the bitcoin system can be replicated over and over again to create an identical product with a different name. The only thing scarce about bitcoin is the name bitcoin. Is that enough? I find it on the edge of impossible for it to last long term, but I could certainly be wrong. I honestly hope I am wrong but I just don't see it happening.

The hard part to replicate about bitcoin is the community. It took two years to build up the community, and I think that it would be difficult to replicate that just by tweaking the code a bit and starting a parrallel blockchain. That said, anyone is welcome to try it. If it has features that make it superior to bitcoin, it would probably eventually win. However, they must be features that are obviously superior to a large percentage of the Internet using population. I don't really think that is going to happen, myself. Bitcoin is already very resiliant to attack as well as increasingly useful to Joe Android User in 1st world nations. There are competing smartphone clients that allow in person transactions (with Internet available) and I don't think it's a far leap before smartphones can transact in person sans Internet via Dash7, ad-hoc wifi or NFC. Nor do I think we are very far from a system that caters to regular cell phones via SMS or the like, a la M-Pesa; which is actually a huge leap for people in 2nd & 3rd world urban areas, although it might not be quite so useful for 1st world urban areas such as Toyko. Still, it seems to work out pretty well in NYC.