What is the biggest difference between Bitcoin and gold as an investment? As most of us know, gold has been a treasured commodity for generations, while Bitcoin is a new commodity and has no matching track record.
While recently speaking on BusinessDay TV, senior portfolio manager Wayne McCurrie of Ashburton Investments said that gold is basically a Bitcoin since there is a strong constant demand but it has a limited supply. Another similarity between Bitcoin and gold is that they are both sovereign currencies which cannot be controlled by a government.
They are also able to get the same value anywhere in the world.
McCurrie said that gold has been around for nearly 5,000 years, during which time it has been traded widely and has a recognized value. However, Bitcoin has yet to achieve the same.
What exactly then, is a Bitcoin?
Bitcoin is the first decentralized digital currency in the world. This innovative system for virtual money was originally introduced in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto, a software developer from Australia and was made available to the public in 2009. The system allows members of the bitcoin community to "mine" new Bitcoins using open-source software to solve complicated mathematical problems.
In the system, the maximum total of bitcoins that can ever be mined is capped at $21 billion.
A Bitcoin is defined by the record of its various transactions between different addresses. Addresses consist entirely of randomly generated sequences of numbers and letters. A user purchases a Bitcoin by using another privately kept sequence of numbers and letters in the form of a key. Every Miner has to verify each bitcoin transaction.
Bitcoin The Victim Of Its Own Success
McCurrie said, that if Bitcoin should become really successful, it could easily become the victim of its own success, simply because it will become constituted. Another point to note is that governments will never tolerate a separate monetary system operating outside of their own formal banking setup, so if it gets really huge, it may even become illegal.
China Is The Reason Bitcoin Is Going Up.
The Reason why Bitcoin is enjoying such popularity right now and why prices are going up is because of China’s rigid monetary exchange controls, and as such, the only way of getting your invested capital out of China now is via Bitcoin, which makes exporting money from there, very lucrative.
So then, while the differences between Bitcoin and gold, understandably, run much deeper, the most obvious difference between it and gold is this - gold is physical, Bitcoin is digital. We all know gold is a Precious Metal used by man as an instrument of exchange for thousands of years and gold is also useful in manufacturing and technology and is highly regarded for its beauty in the form of art, jewelry, and trinkets.
Gold is generally considered a stable long-term investment as well as a hedge in market levity. On the other hand, Bitcoin is a crowdsourced, coded, currency that did not exist until 2009. In closing, McCurrie warned also, that there is a hyped up dynamic about Bitcoin right now, which can change at any moment.
