<story><title>How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/technology/bitcoin-winklevoss-twins.html?hp&amp;action=click&amp;pgtype=Homepage&amp;clickSource=story-heading&amp;module=second-column-region&amp;region=top-news&amp;WT.nav=top-news&amp;_r=0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TheBiv</author><text>&amp;gt;&amp;gt; They said they might look at selling when the value of all the Bitcoin in circulation approaches the value of all gold in the world — some $7 trillion or $8 trillion compared with the $310 billion value of all Bitcoin on Tuesday — given that they think Bitcoin is set to replace gold as a rare commodity. But then Tyler Winklevoss questioned even that, pointing out the ways that he believes Bitcoin is better than gold.&lt;p&gt;I found this to be the most fascinating part of the article.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sytelus</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s quite a balony.&lt;p&gt;- Both are in fixed quantity so none is more rare than other.&lt;p&gt;- Gold has practical use in industry which puts lower bound on its value. BTC has no lower bound.&lt;p&gt;- Gold is exchangeable virtually in any country and any culture regardless of how technologically advanced that society is.&lt;p&gt;- Thousands of years of history has proven that humans have almost natural lust for this shiny metal and it gets displayed as jewelry uses. This again further sets the lower bound for gold prices.&lt;p&gt;- Gold is not only rare but is virtually rust proof and can be stowed away without any advanced tech for 100s of years. BTC will be pointless if there was a natural or human made disaster and few people had electricity.&lt;p&gt;- Gold is far more unlikely to be made illegal by governments.&lt;p&gt;- There are no new rare metals popping up every day like whole slew of new cryptocurrencies which might fragment and trump each other. No one knows which cryptocurrency will end up dominating 10 years down the line.&lt;p&gt;- BTC has huge risk of getting stolen and hacked because someone exploiting zero day vulnerabilities in your system even if you did everything you possibly could to keep your system safe.&lt;p&gt;- Governments can start their secret operations to control the crypto market behind the scene, hack in to exchanges, find vulnerabilities or do dirty trades.&lt;p&gt;- Crypto exchanges are wild west without regulations which means clever deep pocketed traders would be exploiting them by techniques like frontrunning, wash trades, willybot, spoofing etc. This enables big investors to profit at the expense of small investors.&lt;p&gt;Above arguments should make it clear that btc has very real upper bound that it can rationally reach and its most definitely less than gold market cap. Of course, big investors can juice up things in the short term but it would be impossible to sustain irrational highs on long term.</text></comment>
<story><title>How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/technology/bitcoin-winklevoss-twins.html?hp&amp;action=click&amp;pgtype=Homepage&amp;clickSource=story-heading&amp;module=second-column-region&amp;region=top-news&amp;WT.nav=top-news&amp;_r=0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TheBiv</author><text>&amp;gt;&amp;gt; They said they might look at selling when the value of all the Bitcoin in circulation approaches the value of all gold in the world — some $7 trillion or $8 trillion compared with the $310 billion value of all Bitcoin on Tuesday — given that they think Bitcoin is set to replace gold as a rare commodity. But then Tyler Winklevoss questioned even that, pointing out the ways that he believes Bitcoin is better than gold.&lt;p&gt;I found this to be the most fascinating part of the article.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>epx</author><text>Good luck trying to make a fountain pen nib with a cryptocoin :)</text></comment>