<story><title>Bitcoin and almost every other cryptocurrency crashed hard today</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/22/bitcoin-crypto-crashed-hard/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jcranmer</author><text>Serious question: what value would gold have in a post-apocalyptic world? If I&amp;#x27;m selling something, why should I take gold in exchange for it, instead of something useful, like ammunition or food or water?</text></item><item><author>monocasa</author><text>And a big piece of gold&amp;#x27;s value is that it&amp;#x27;s been a store of value for longer than recorded history.&lt;p&gt;Hell, if the world went belly up, Mad Max style, there&amp;#x27;s a good chance that whatever gold you have would be worth even more.</text></item><item><author>IkmoIkmo</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s essentially nothing driving the price increase in 2017. Payment processing, remittance, asset-backing, digital identities, micropayments, bitcoin ATMs, VC-backed bitcoin startups, none of these things took off at all in 2017, in fact if anything the exciting years regarding these usecases&amp;#x2F;infrastructure ventures were 2013-2015.&lt;p&gt;I bet if you ask 100 people why they bought and if they use bitcoin for anything in particular, 99 will say no. That&amp;#x27;s why none of this is a real surprise.&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, apart from appreciation of gold as jewellery (partially because it&amp;#x27;s expensive) and some industrial use (fraction of the gold industry), in large part gold too exhibits price growth sustained by nothing but a simple cultural notion that it&amp;#x27;s scarce and valuable. Countries, banks, pension funds etc aren&amp;#x27;t putting hundreds of billions of dollars worth into stacks of gold bars locked in vaults because of their industrial or jewellery usage, after all. Bitcoin, as little the growth of real-life usecases has been in 2017, may have established itself as an alternative store of value. I don&amp;#x27;t agree with that myself (just as like I think it&amp;#x27;s utterly useless to invest in gold as a store of value), but who cares about me.&lt;p&gt;So it remains to be seen what&amp;#x27;ll happen the next ten years, maybe it&amp;#x27;ll still remain as a store of value. I&amp;#x27;m no longer buying though. The &amp;#x27;using bitcoin&amp;#x27; vs &amp;#x27;bitcoin as store of value&amp;#x27; became completely lopsided in favour of the latter, which was the point I cashed out.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>agarden</author><text>If I were convinced the apocalypse were going to happen in the next couple years, I would start storing up ramen noodles, Hersheys chocolate bars, and M&amp;amp;Ms. Cheap to purchase, easy to store, and likely to have astronomic value post-apocalypse.</text></comment>
<story><title>Bitcoin and almost every other cryptocurrency crashed hard today</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/22/bitcoin-crypto-crashed-hard/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jcranmer</author><text>Serious question: what value would gold have in a post-apocalyptic world? If I&amp;#x27;m selling something, why should I take gold in exchange for it, instead of something useful, like ammunition or food or water?</text></item><item><author>monocasa</author><text>And a big piece of gold&amp;#x27;s value is that it&amp;#x27;s been a store of value for longer than recorded history.&lt;p&gt;Hell, if the world went belly up, Mad Max style, there&amp;#x27;s a good chance that whatever gold you have would be worth even more.</text></item><item><author>IkmoIkmo</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s essentially nothing driving the price increase in 2017. Payment processing, remittance, asset-backing, digital identities, micropayments, bitcoin ATMs, VC-backed bitcoin startups, none of these things took off at all in 2017, in fact if anything the exciting years regarding these usecases&amp;#x2F;infrastructure ventures were 2013-2015.&lt;p&gt;I bet if you ask 100 people why they bought and if they use bitcoin for anything in particular, 99 will say no. That&amp;#x27;s why none of this is a real surprise.&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, apart from appreciation of gold as jewellery (partially because it&amp;#x27;s expensive) and some industrial use (fraction of the gold industry), in large part gold too exhibits price growth sustained by nothing but a simple cultural notion that it&amp;#x27;s scarce and valuable. Countries, banks, pension funds etc aren&amp;#x27;t putting hundreds of billions of dollars worth into stacks of gold bars locked in vaults because of their industrial or jewellery usage, after all. Bitcoin, as little the growth of real-life usecases has been in 2017, may have established itself as an alternative store of value. I don&amp;#x27;t agree with that myself (just as like I think it&amp;#x27;s utterly useless to invest in gold as a store of value), but who cares about me.&lt;p&gt;So it remains to be seen what&amp;#x27;ll happen the next ten years, maybe it&amp;#x27;ll still remain as a store of value. I&amp;#x27;m no longer buying though. The &amp;#x27;using bitcoin&amp;#x27; vs &amp;#x27;bitcoin as store of value&amp;#x27; became completely lopsided in favour of the latter, which was the point I cashed out.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>CamelCaseName</author><text>Because there&amp;#x27;s an expectation that you can use gold to buy something else you need.&lt;p&gt;This expectation may not hold, but whatever the post-apocalyptic world settles on first will likely be there to stay for a while.</text></comment>