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Trey9d ago
Gold crossed $30 trillion in total value and the gold bugs came out swinging. Bitcoin is "useless," they said. Gold has real utility — electronics, jewelry, dentistry, space tech. They're right. And that's exactly the problem. When a monetary asset gets pulled toward industrial demand, its price stops reflecting monetary fundamentals. Silver prices move with iPhone production cycles. Gold prices fall when jewelry sales slump. That's not a feature of sound money — it's noise. A measuring stick that warps depending on how many circuit boards are being manufactured isn't a measuring stick anymore. There's also the supply problem. Higher prices incentivize more mining. New extraction expands supply and dilutes every existing holder. The 1850s gold rushes caused inflationary spikes even under the gold standard. This is the commodity trap — the very utility that drives demand also drives new production that undermines scarcity. Bitcoin was designed around exactly this insight. No industrial use. No jewelry demand. No ability to mine more of it when the price rises. The supply schedule is fixed regardless of what markets do. Its "uselessness" is a deliberate feature — it removes every mechanism by which scarcity could erode. You can't email gold. You can't split it for small payments. You can't settle across borders in seconds. Gold was the best monetary technology of the physical age. Bitcoin is what happens when you rebuild money from scratch for an age that runs on information. The gold bugs are gloating. Fair enough. But the argument they think they're making — that utility proves superiority — is actually the best case for why bitcoin wins long-term. https://firebtc.io/p/gloating-goldbugs
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Replies (2)

Neal9d ago
the entire “non-monetary uses of a monetary object make it more valuable money” is logically incoherent. I break down the argument step by step in my book, and give Peter Schiff, the poster child of this line of thinking, his turn through the logical ringer. Somewhere, thousands of years ago, there was a peter schiff crying that gold wasn’t money because it couldn’t be eaten like cows or wheat.
0000 sats
weiMERICA Republic9d ago
Yap stones. Broken. Glass beads. Broken. Tobacco. Broken Gold. Will be broken. Man, in all his ingenuity, is incentivized to break commodity money. True scarcity can only be achieved through mathematics and code.
0000 sats