For thousands of years gold has dominated our society as a store of value and sometimes as a medium of exchange in the form of coins and ingots. There has been rhetoric floating around that Bitcoin will replace gold as the ultimate store of value! Why I think this is wrong and even impossible:

Gold is indestructible and relatively scarce on our planet. It is physically impossible to create any substantial amounts of gold in a lab. The question of Bitcoin’s destructibility is an hour-long debate, but because Bitcoin is infinitely divisible I will argue that it is destructible. It is cryptographically impossible to create any more than 21 million Bitcoins, and here arises the problem. If someone was able, by some miracle, to generate 51% of Bitcoin’s hashes, the Bitcoin network is gone. Forever. The difference between “physically impossible” and “cryptographically impossible” is a significant difference and should not be taken lightly.

Gold has lasted for thousands of years and almost everyone on this planet sees value in this precious metal, Bitcoin on the other hand was created just 13 years ago and a very small percentage of people see value in this digital currency. Bitcoin is simply not a store of value.

Bitcoin was designed to be “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” as noted on the white-paper written by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009. Bitcoin was not designed to be, nor is it a store of value.

Some will argue “zoom out” in reference to the Bitcoin vs. gold graph, but let me ask you this? Do you want the asset that you hold as a store of value to be down almost 40% from the all-time-high of $69,000…