I keep hearing people call Bitcoin “digital gold.”
But gold has been around for thousands of years, and Bitcoin is only ~16 years old.
Do you think Bitcoin can really replace gold as a store of value — or should they just complement each other?
I’m curious what older members here think!
Bitcoin is better money than gold. To understand why Bitcoin is better, you first need to understand what money really is, you need to know what its basic functions are
Means of exchange-medium of exchange.Money lets us trade goods and services. It’s the ultimate good that can be swapped for anything else. With money, all human work can be exchanged fairly.
Means of measuring value ,unit of account Money serves as a means of expressing the value of a particular good or service. Just like we measure weight in kilograms and length in meters, we measure the value of goods and services with money
Means of storing value , store of value.Money must hold value over time. It lets us save today’s work and spend it in the future. When you earn, you can store your purchasing power for later.
In the early days of civilization, people realized they needed something a medium of exchange, store of value, and unit of account , money , to make trade easier, because bartering goods for goods was very difficult. So they started looking for something that could serve this purpose. Early forms of money were things like whale teeth, glass beads, and Rai stones. People used all of these as money until they eventually discovered gold and silver, which they then minted into coins.For something to be money, it must meet certain monetary properties, it must be scarce, durable, divisible, portable, fungible, and easily recognizable
Gold was scarce and durable, but it wasn’t easy to transport or verify.That’s why, at one point in history, banks emerged.People who were in the business of lending money with interest during the 13th and 14th centuries started offering services to store gold. These places were later called banks. In return for storing gold, they gave people paper notes that represented the amount of gold they had deposited. People found it much easier to use these paper notes as a medium of exchange instead of going to the bank every time to withdraw their gold.
When the moneylenders realized that hardly anyone came to claim their gold all at once, they started printing more paper notes and lending them out with interest. This is how today’s fiat currencies were born fundamentally, they are debt and come into existence through borrowing
Bitcoin is better money because it has all the key monetary properties, scarcity durability, divisibility, portability, fungibility easy verification Such a perfect combination monetary properties, has never existed in the physical world . that’s why Bitcoin is called a superior form of money and the next step in the evolution of money That’s why it’s better money than gold , because it has better monetary properties.