The return of the bull market has brought back many of the same old debates about investment. This is well evidenced by the debated between Saifedean Ammous and Peter Schiff on the Tone Vays Youtube channel on May 20. Schiff defends gold’s position as a global store of value, and Ammadous tried to convince him Bitcoin Core (BTC) is supplanting it in a 90-minute exchange.
Ammaous argued the points that you’d come to expect in favor of BTC. He said:
“You can’t build a global money transfer system based on gold because governments have confiscated gold in the 1930s, governments still control the majority of gold, governments are able to influence the market for gold through their sales and lending… and governments own a big chunk of the gold.”
Schiff, who feels gold doesn’t get as much advocacy as it deserves for the world’s oldest store of value, argued that it holds the same ease of trade that BTC has. “I can transfer my rights to my gold – I can have gold sitting in a vault in Brinks and I can send my ownership rights instantly for free,” he pointed out.
The gold advocate also bashed BTC for its potential regulatory issues, noting that it won’t have any value if it’s illegal worldwide. Ammous rebutted that even if BTC doesn’t reach the potential that its backers hope, it’s still preferable as a decentralized, government-divorced asset.
These are the arguments of two sides that can’t see the forest from the trees. Gold, even if it is still a valuable commodity for its use in electronics and luxury goods, can’t easily be used as a unit of trade. BTC developers won’t follow the one vision that would make it a useful digital currency, and fight the governments that could help them get there.
Neither side is trying to argue that their commodity is trying to be a currency; they just want to support the one that is the best store of value. Even doing that, neither side makes a convincing case because there are simply too many faults to both.
The world needs a new currency that is suited to the fast moving pace of the online and interconnected world we live in. That currency can double as a store of value, eliminating a preposterous divide between the rich and the middle class. The only realistic option for that, due to its massive blockchain scaling, is Bitcoin SV (BSV).
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