Oddbean

I really think people have misunderstood the key limitations that led gold to be so completely captured. It’s about SCALE of value transfer, not simply that it’s centralized into custodians. The larger the scale, the MORE captured gold is, rather than less. Moving $200 of gold is easy. Moving $2 Trillion is practically impossible. Entire countries neither hold nor settle their own, physical gold during deals. This is perfectly opposite for bitcoin. The larger the amount the easier. The larger the amount the cheaper and move important and more astonishingly unique the degree of control and ability to safeguard, fine grain control and time for certain actions, to build vaults, to distribute politically, and 1,000 other options can exist to protect and remove trust in EVERY transaction of value above $1 million. Sure we want this to be given to everybody, but the idea that a small country and stick the middle finger to a large one and keep their capital perfectly safe, is a world shattering shift in the power dynamic. And there is no central bank in the world that can maintain interest rate manipulation against the market if $1 trillion in value can leave the country in under 10 minutes. To add to this, it’s a permissionless and open network. In other words, ANY solution, or tool, or protocol we want to run on top of it, it doesn’t matter who has what coins, in which custodians, under what jurisdiction, they still can stop no one from launching their own system payment or cryptographic tool to solve whatever problem they seek. What happened to gold will not come close to happening with #Bitcoin, even in the worst case scenario. Whatever a Bitcoin “captured” world would look like, if things decentralize and we get trusted custodians as the dominant platforms and all that re-centralization that we got with the web… it STILL will be orders of magnitude superior to the fiat world we are currently in because even if it *fails* to conquer our entire vision, bitcoin still solves some of the most critical issues of gold merely as a global digital, permissionless currency backing, perfect collateral, and censorship resistant SoV. IMO, it will be revolutionary no matter what. It is up to us *how* revolutionary we want it to be. I dig more deeply into those key differences in this show if interested: https://fountain.fm/episode/ZBlS2FEz5lCWlQQeSG5K