Oddbean

Gold is, in several ways, better than Bitcoin. Gold is immutable, indestructible, physical, shiny, has medical and scientific applications etc. Bitcoin is just bitcoin; same elements of the above but intangible, and thus practically no use. Also requires electricity, operational nodes and miners for it's functionality and basis of operation. Both have their risks and downsides, both can be seized if not hidden, but given we are in a digital age, it's quite fitting that we've come to this "digital gold" mandate for Bitcoin. I always wondered, as a risk exercise, what/how one would use bitcoin when nuclear emp's have gone off. Gold will actually survive that blast(albeit dust) and radioactivity. Will your ledger and seed phrase? Questions and Thoughts. nostr:nevent1qvzqqqqqqypzqy5l2xy46y4t8jwdcfkty27mh80frrjlrnle39pl8psw75aygxqrqqs0dxcpype9h2xpdfflk7wv6jlvm79ws03wv6y267mfn2mq04rasnqjxujm5

you could maybe spin up some of the nodes again and run the network, but it'd be an interesting challenge because you'd also need to mine that difficulty + electricity and other caveats. Entirely possible though

Yeah, gold is really so superior to bitcoin that a friend of mine tried to sell 1.5 kg and only got an offer with a -4.6% discount, after a week of trying to sell. And the transaction was in a secure, armored room with armed guards. In the end, it seems that paper gold is worth more than physical gold… 🤡

there's literally gold inside your motherboard on your device right now, but yeah, "bitcoin". If you want digital gold, buy any finite digital currency out there, hell, there's several forks of bitcoin with the same 21m limit, so what makes BTC any better than the next fork of Bitcoin? Gold is gold is gold is gold. Armed guards, no armed guards, discounts or premiums - same same for Bitcoin, but Gold still edges Bitcoin and this is a fact because it's tangible and can be used in the devices you use to store your bitcoin.

I was thinking similar but more from a Carrington style event from the sun. Assuming it's the worst and it burns out all electrical devices everywhere (assuming the solar flare is bad enough to go through a full rotation of the Earth) Bitcoin is useless, but almost equally gold is too. At that point why would you care about it apart from maybe its antibacterial properties? So in your scenario of a few spots hit by EMP Bitcoin could survive with people elsewhere. It will be a disaster it would obviously set things back, but it wouldn't necessarily be the end of it. I guess in the end it could actually discourage countries bombing each other in the first place. I still don't hate precious metals at the end of the day, they have their use. Also where they still offer a lot of value is a PM coin has privacy beyond anything Bitcoin can currently offer.

good points, and tbh at that stage, I don't think money would be on the minds of people; more like food, water and shelter/medical. In my risk exercises, I like to go to extremes and then work my way back from there. At the current rate, we could get nodes up and running again pretty quickly, given resilient data centers in bunkers and elsewhere, but there's caveats to getting it operational again, the biggest being electricity for mining the difficulty and running the network. I think in a post-scenario world, say 10 years post, we could actually just swap over to Bitcoin entirely - but that bleeds into another thought exercise of "what will it take to get Bitcoin to be the standard" Why I say Gold edge Bitcoin is simply because of it's tangibility. I can cut off a piece of chainlet, give it to you as payment and then hammer the chainlink together again, carrying it on me. You also mentioned the medical use case, as well as the hardware use case. Bitcoin doesn't provide these tangible vectors, but as it stands, bitcoin is an intangible gold-type asset at a vastly cheaper cost(warehousing fees, protection fees, auditing fees).

Yes money is like a tool or function of a large society in a dire situation especially with modern communication breakdown the people left will likely resort to barter more like in small tribal societues. You make lots of interesting points too, with regard to the tangibility Bitcoin is really money for the modern age if things are well less modern in the future perhaps tangibles will come back. Perhaps I need to Faraday cage my node! In fact if micro grids and ones associated with miners started doing it it might encourage the national grids to finally start taking steps....

Gold is difficult and expensive to exchange for small transactions (unless coins become commonplace again). Bitcoin is slow and expensive to exchange for small transactions like coffee. Bitcoin has layer 2 protocols like Lightning Network. An almost identical Lightning Network would work for gold. Send AUs electronically, when balance offset between two nodes gets high - send physical gold (with accompanying expense for insurance and security).