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.... if I had to make a choice and I would not be an overly risk averse person that can't sleep at night, I would go with bitcoin anytime. Surely, we could choose to allocate to both bitcoin and gold, and personally, I don't see it to be necessary to allocate to gold for guys who have bitcoin, yet there are still going to be some guys who choose to have both.. and it really seems crazy when there are guys who claim to understand bitcoin, yet they choose to allocate anymore than 10% of the size of their bitcoin allocation to gold.
And there is still risk that gold could be sold. The same way that bitcoin holders take profit and dump the price from time to time, the same way it can happen to any asset. I don't know the whole array of risk factors that gold is facing, but I can only imagine there are quite a few and whether the price right now is fair value or not, nobody knows. It could be as much manipulated as people think bitcoin is manipulated.
Sure, both can be manipulated, and gold has been manipulated for quite a long time, including various aspects of it's being manipulated in the last 100 years should not be under appreciated, including in the last 30-ish years, there have been more and more financialization of gold and the creation of a variety of new gold paper products.
Based on bitcoin's attributes relative to gold's attributes, it seems quite a bit harder to manipulate bitcoin - especially since bitcoin is more portable, more verifiable, easier to hold in self-custody, more divisible and quite a bit less costly, so gold's physicality also gets in the way in terms of contributing to costs and contributing to its being manipulated in more ways than bitcoin can be manipulated.
From our talks we had here back and forth across a couple of topics, I believe to know that you are not in your 30s anymore.
I am hinting at this because from my experience, the older the people I talk to, the more they cling to the idea that, generally speaking, digital assets must be some imaginary bubble or as long as you can't touch something, it can't have value. I am taking it to the extreme, but older people tend to rather lean toward that end of the spectrum. That is why I like that you have such a definite stance on bitcoin because you did your analysis, go for the pro and for the contra and turns out that bitcoin has more pro and less contra than gold. I see it exactly the same way. From my point of view bitcoin has one of the most important characteristics ever in that its issued quantity is verifiable, ownership is provable, and supply is limited and these characteristics are kept in check and double check and triple check... 24 hours around the clock 365 days a year forever, done by thousands and thousands of independent actors who have an almost infinitely strong incentive to play by the rules.
Something to read and why verifiability matters.
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A complete review of the gold reserves held at Fort Knox, famously one of the most secure facilities in the world, has not been conducted since the 1950s, according to the Sound Money Defense League, a public advocacy organization focused on state and federal monetary legislation. The organization added that the government last conducted a partial audit in 1974.
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If a review is conducted, any discrepancy between the reserves in Fort Knox and the figures that have been reported could send shock waves through global gold markets.
The administration from protection to storage to running the facility to transportation and other downsides like corrupt auditors (which I think is a big issue), everything is so complicated with gold that people should begin to see, as you also pointed out in your post, how valuable verifiability, security and mobility is with bitcoin. Government reports it has 100,000 BTC? Ok, provide a signature to the addresses and publish it on a website, work done.
The audit alone of thousands and thousands of gold bars is a joke. In bitcoin you can't steal a satoshi going unnoticed. Impossible. Whether someone exchanges a real gold bar for a fake gold bar, nobody can tell and seriously, nobody can reliably audit that on a year to year basis.
You get all these issues and that is why you say there is no reason to hold gold, when instead I can have the superior version of it that I can access from anywhere in the world, any island, probably any planet if (for now) Starlink reaches it.
Gold can be manipulated based on the fact alone that nobody can tell with certainty whether reported reserves are true or not. In bitcoin those who verify don't have an incentive to manipulate. It is somehow like separation of power in politics. There is less redundancy in the incentives of different actors and corruption can't take place because you can't just collude with a handful of people and achieve your criminal goals. If you were able to bribe someone who could manipulate, that actor has all incentives to decline as it is probably a miner and has bought hardware and is running facilities, which in case of a successful attack would become worthless within seconds.
With gold reserves in Fort Knox, I don't think it is practically impossible to infiltrate the line of command that's responsible for protection and verification and if it happens, nobody will notice probably. Again different in bitcoin where it will be noticed by the whole world within seconds.
My stance is that I ask myself how many people still don't own any bitcoin and could get some with just a few clicks into a wallet they can control themselves with ease if they do some least amount of research. I don't think in 10 years from now the majority would still prefer a gold bar in their basement over a bitcoin in their wallet.
I agree with you, yet I doubt it is going to take 10 years for bitcoin's superiority to gold and/or gold's inferiority to bitcoin to be figured out by wider and wider swaths of the populace, and also including institutions and governments to more broadly recognition of bitcoin's superiority to gold.
Maybe 10 years is too short, but 15-20 years and the reason I choose this number is because I see how the younger people, from 15-25 years, deal with digital assets as if it was nothing special. Gold will still have its appeal as I think the value of tangibility is hardwired into our brains. But the hassle to hoard a gold bar, not being able to access it from everywhere, the thrive for freedom and flexibility and the increased literacy in computers and digital systems in general will do its work over time in favor of an asset like bitcoin. More bitcoiners will take important decision making positions in our society that are now still held by gold advocates or anti-bitcoiners.
I am positive that time is on the bitcoiners' side.