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Vibes guy here. I dabbled in Bitcoin for about a year, on the notion that if the world's overall financial system got degraded, more people would view Bitcoin h

by GCA10 8mo ago

Vibes guy here. I dabbled in Bitcoin for about a year, on the notion that if the world's overall financial system got degraded, more people would view Bitcoin holdings as a safe way to preserve value. Maybe better than owning physical gold. Why not get in early before the next stampede? But I was wrong about bitcoin > gold. It's worked the other way around. There's also persistent chatter that the supposedly uncrackable Bitcoin private keys might someday be crackable with quantum computing. Preposterous? Maybe. Maybe not. There's a mind-blowing amount of compute coming into the world, and not all of it's going to be used to create goofy memes or robo-PowerPoints. Call me timid, but I cashed out with modest Bitcoin profits last year and am fine watching the show from the sidelines from here on.

blargthorwars 8mo ago
Don't even need quantum to worry: Satoshi's wallet could be a massive rug pull by the CIA/FBA/NSA when the time comes.
- harambae 8mo ago
  No one thinks the FBI is competent enough for it to be them.
rozal 8mo ago
[dead]
creetioc 8mo ago
You can easily trade gold today. You can easily trade gold if ww3 starts to the goons pressganging people into dying in the trenches so they take your bitcoin hoarding neighbor instead. You can easily trade gold after a nuclear apocalypse to your local warlord so you get access to non-irradiated food. Gold is a pretty, shiny rock and rich people like pretty, shiny things so they can display their superiority to no-gold-having proles. Just about everybody on the planet knows gold is highly valuable. It is fundamentally a superior store of value than bitcoin if you’re talking about notable global disruptions, even without going into the actual tech.
- embedding-shape 8mo ago
  Yeah, that angle never worked out for me. If we imagine instead the world became hyper-capitalistic (even more than today), then I could see that digital and untracable (not Bitcoin) decentralized money might have a big influence, but in the opposite scenarios, I don't think there is a lot of need for cryptocurrencies.
- fooker 8mo ago
  You can easily trade gold until someone can force it from you. The amount of gold you can realistically conceal is less than a year of your salary.
  - SkyeCA 8mo ago
    A year of my salary is between 1lbs to 2lbs of gold at current prices. Hiding a few pounds of something isn't very difficult, I do it every Christmas.
    - XorNot 8mo ago
      It might be worth considering why drug deals are always portrayed as a high stakes, dangerous event (it's because to do the sale, the physical products have to all be in one well known place where everybody knows both the place and time).
    - fooker 8mo ago
      How would you go about using 1lb of gold to procure food, water and fuel in a crisis bad enough to disable government/banking? History has shown than people usually lose all their gold in situations like this, pretty much all the time.
      - SkyeCA 8mo ago
        A hacksaw? Just cut it into smaller chunks.
    - SkyeCA 8mo ago
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
torginus 8mo ago
The biggest problem with metals is the same as crypto - there's no fundamental underlying value like P/E or product announcements you can anchor the price to - so its free to fluctuate. How much of a problem that actually is we got to find out last Friday.
- Retric 8mo ago
  A large fraction of gold mined every year is used for its material properties in industrial and electronic applications. That presents a very real floor on price. If good was suddenly worth 1/10th as much we would use it in far more industrial applications thus driving up the price. Similarly mining would slow down from the current ~3,000 tons annually again driving the price up. Gold is currently priced way above that level, but just like the stock market were dividends allow people to buy more stock when the price is low there is a very tangible feedback loop propping up the price which eventually kicks in. Counterintuitively this means using gold as an investment vehicle makes the world a worse place because we fall back to less efficient methods in industry, and efficiency is ultimately the engine of progress.
  - tasuki 8mo ago
    > A large fraction of gold mined every year is used for its material properties in industrial and electronic applications. I thought that was less than 10%. That's a very low floor! (That said, gold is sound money)
    - Retric 8mo ago
      Hence why I said at 1/10th the price we would use a lot more of it. There’s easily decades worth of industrial use in vaults so the instantaneous floor is quite low. However feedback occurs well before you hit the actual limits here.
    - sigwinch 8mo ago
      I read 7% of 2024 demand is industrial. Gold ended 2024 at $2600.
Retr0id 8mo ago
Quantum computing is interesting to think about in the context of bitcoin. It would be technically feasible to upgrade the protocol to be quantum-secure (e.g. allow wallets to make an on-chain declaration of a new PQ pubkey, and after that point all transactions must be signed with the PQ keypair) - but getting everyone to coordinate on something like that would be challenging.
coppsilgold 8mo ago
The way bitcoin works is that addresses are hashes of a public key. This technically allows for an emergency measure in case ECC is broken by a quantum computer: The [unknown] public key becomes the private key. The signature becomes a ZKP of this key. I believe this has been proposed before as well. The signature sizes are going to be a big problem is this scenario however, consensus may actually do something up to alleviate this in extremis. And also the people who have coins in addresses for which the public keys are known will be screwed, but then that's how everyone will know there is a problem - it's unlikely early cryptoraphically-relevant quantum computers (CRQC) will be able to front-run bitcoin transactions.
morgoo 8mo ago
Quantum computing isn't a serious threat. Would require a concentrated effort from the community to migrate to a quantum-proof hashing algorithm but there's no greater motivation than potentially losing it all.

by GCA10 8mo ago

blargthorwars 8mo ago

Don't even need quantum to worry: Satoshi's wallet could be a massive rug pull by the CIA/FBA/NSA when the time comes.

harambae 8mo ago
No one thinks the FBI is competent enough for it to be them.

rozal 8mo ago

[dead]

creetioc 8mo ago

You can easily trade gold today. You can easily trade gold if ww3 starts to the goons pressganging people into dying in the trenches so they take your bitcoin hoarding neighbor instead. You can easily trade gold after a nuclear apocalypse to your local warlord so you get access to non-irradiated food. Gold is a pretty, shiny rock and rich people like pretty, shiny things so they can display their superiority to no-gold-having proles. Just about everybody on the planet knows gold is highly valuable. It is fundamentally a superior store of value than bitcoin if you’re talking about notable global disruptions, even without going into the actual tech.

embedding-shape 8mo ago
Yeah, that angle never worked out for me. If we imagine instead the world became hyper-capitalistic (even more than today), then I could see that digital and untracable (not Bitcoin) decentralized money might have a big influence, but in the opposite scenarios, I don't think there is a lot of need for cryptocurrencies.
fooker 8mo ago
You can easily trade gold until someone can force it from you. The amount of gold you can realistically conceal is less than a year of your salary.
- SkyeCA 8mo ago
  A year of my salary is between 1lbs to 2lbs of gold at current prices. Hiding a few pounds of something isn't very difficult, I do it every Christmas.
  - XorNot 8mo ago
    It might be worth considering why drug deals are always portrayed as a high stakes, dangerous event (it's because to do the sale, the physical products have to all be in one well known place where everybody knows both the place and time).
  - fooker 8mo ago
    How would you go about using 1lb of gold to procure food, water and fuel in a crisis bad enough to disable government/banking? History has shown than people usually lose all their gold in situations like this, pretty much all the time.
    - SkyeCA 8mo ago
      A hacksaw? Just cut it into smaller chunks.
  - SkyeCA 8mo ago

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

torginus 8mo ago

The biggest problem with metals is the same as crypto - there's no fundamental underlying value like P/E or product announcements you can anchor the price to - so its free to fluctuate. How much of a problem that actually is we got to find out last Friday.

Retric 8mo ago
A large fraction of gold mined every year is used for its material properties in industrial and electronic applications. That presents a very real floor on price. If good was suddenly worth 1/10th as much we would use it in far more industrial applications thus driving up the price. Similarly mining would slow down from the current ~3,000 tons annually again driving the price up. Gold is currently priced way above that level, but just like the stock market were dividends allow people to buy more stock when the price is low there is a very tangible feedback loop propping up the price which eventually kicks in. Counterintuitively this means using gold as an investment vehicle makes the world a worse place because we fall back to less efficient methods in industry, and efficiency is ultimately the engine of progress.
- tasuki 8mo ago
  > A large fraction of gold mined every year is used for its material properties in industrial and electronic applications. I thought that was less than 10%. That's a very low floor! (That said, gold is sound money)
  - Retric 8mo ago
    Hence why I said at 1/10th the price we would use a lot more of it. There’s easily decades worth of industrial use in vaults so the instantaneous floor is quite low. However feedback occurs well before you hit the actual limits here.
  - sigwinch 8mo ago
    I read 7% of 2024 demand is industrial. Gold ended 2024 at $2600.

Retr0id 8mo ago

Quantum computing is interesting to think about in the context of bitcoin. It would be technically feasible to upgrade the protocol to be quantum-secure (e.g. allow wallets to make an on-chain declaration of a new PQ pubkey, and after that point all transactions must be signed with the PQ keypair) - but getting everyone to coordinate on something like that would be challenging.

coppsilgold 8mo ago

The way bitcoin works is that addresses are hashes of a public key. This technically allows for an emergency measure in case ECC is broken by a quantum computer: The [unknown] public key becomes the private key. The signature becomes a ZKP of this key. I believe this has been proposed before as well. The signature sizes are going to be a big problem is this scenario however, consensus may actually do something up to alleviate this in extremis. And also the people who have coins in addresses for which the public keys are known will be screwed, but then that's how everyone will know there is a problem - it's unlikely early cryptoraphically-relevant quantum computers (CRQC) will be able to front-run bitcoin transactions.

morgoo 8mo ago

Quantum computing isn't a serious threat. Would require a concentrated effort from the community to migrate to a quantum-proof hashing algorithm but there's no greater motivation than potentially losing it all.