Your whole case for gold seems based on some desire to limit oneself to local affairs solely within physical reach of unregulated off-grid off-archy anarcho communal societies. That's fine. But if so, it's not reality... that thinking fails when considering obvious externality dependencies gold incurs... - where to get the gold in the first place, most mines and exchange are fuck all far from agrarian chicken based communes. - how to price it effectively in relation to global markets, even between communes, including mineflation effects... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_gold - how to transmit it beyond the physical limitations of distance and weight one or more supposedly trusted human beings (ie: only yourself) can store, carry, and reach. Once you start dreaming up and creating a trustable system to store, transmit, or price gold or anything else over a non self distance, you've effectively created a cryptocurrency system. Even old school hawala could be considered a cryptocurrency system, a shitty one, with more risk of third party loss, and physical transmission dependant settlement now and then. Mostly just numbers in a ledger, distributed or not. Sure gold as a portion of holdings as a grid down backup and even daily local use if you want, but you know as well as anyone else you're far more likely to be shipping aka transmitting crypto off to buy some remote thing, than some physible like gold. As before, bottom line, it's really fucking hard and expensive to trustably transmit gold to all the places one might want to send it in today's world. Thus cryptocurrency analog to gold has arisen and is being adopted. If you want to live in a different world where physical gold is actually securely usable over a distance, or is somehow immune to pump and dump exacted at your local borders to your detriment, start telling us what that world would look like. Surely so long as Governments and Banks are present and fucking with "cash", cash is not a real option if you want to avoid being fucked with, least not because "monetary policy" print and burn. Not to mention the hard problem of counterfeiting whether they exist or not. Same with gold, as nobody will bother assaying when selling their chickens, cars, services, etc. Gold is at least reasonable, but is also a really fucking hard problem. That's partly why it got easily and rapidly displaced by the wrong cryptocurrency system, aka Fiat.
correlation is not causation
The wall street crypto market, unlike dark and under the table cryptocurrency usage models, is very sensitive to government. It will settle down as adoption cap begins to nullify government cap.
govcorp will still be able to attack THE USERS
Again, cryptoanarchy assumptions... - electricity, comms (internet), encryption Of course cryptocurrency fails without those. So does this list, and anything else in life appearing since those things dawn.
Point being, crypto systems by themselves are powerless.
So are "cash" and gold. Belief, examination, and usage imparted accordingly, makes all three powerful.
massive infrastructure ... costing ... NSA
Whole other discussion to consider if current GovCorp model is most efficient means of achieving above assumptions securely... #OpenFabs , #OpenHW , #OpenMeshNet , #OpenEnergy
all depend on ONE unique ledger
Most cryptocurrencies that utilize a single unique ledger do so in a redundantly distributed fashion, etc.
yes, the ONE ledger is managed in a distributed fashion, but it still is ONE ledger. So there still is a centralized bottleneck.
Under the assumptions, distributed single ledgers do require education in order to avoid things like 51%. Similar education to avoid losing their gold to attacks.
Unlike N different central "cash" or Gold ledgers where N is the number of accounts you have at such GovCorpBank
well that's my point. Systems that require a ledger are centralized by design. The moment you start using a ledger supposefly based on gold you are not using gold anymore. Just 'golden' IOUs.
To avoid IOU's and deposit ledgers suggests that people are able to, and or wanted to, personally hold their entire life's transactions and worth in gold and chickens. If that were true "ledgers" would never have been created. But it's not, because they can't and or don't want to. Multiple entire separate ledgers "account" at multiple places are survivably redundant, but only usable within their local spheres of trust, and not reconcilable and or aggregatable into a wider market without trust between them. So again, if you want that, which most do, you're back to creating a "system" to do that, which if it's strong enough to do it right, is itself morphable into a cryptocurrency.
what I mean by 'cash' is a something that doesn't need a middleman. I can pay you using bits of metals, or even physical bills issued by a govt mafia,
Most everything is brought to you, brokered, mined, issued, secretly held in reserve, etc by a middleman. Gold and cash are no exception. Purchase power of every single GovCorp cash physical bills ever has always dropped over time. You can pay people with it, but there's zero reason to want to hold it long term. Gold weight directly vs a basket of goods over time, now that's more interesting comparison, you can post a link to that...
without needing an internet connection and without anybody knowing that the transaction took place apart from us two. Digital 'cash' does not have those properties.
Bitcoin-BTC over clearnet... definitely not. Privacy coins (or over darknets)... more likely, and as crypto brings things down.
we can use bills to make transactions that are 'anonymous' and don't go through any central clearinghouse.
If you're willing and able to safely hoard them. If not, you're back into the ledger and transmission systems, and bill serial number scanners at banks, in bill acceptors, with cameras recording you, etc.
by decentralized I mean that transactions using 'physical tokens' do not need to be recorded in or go through any unique database for them to work. And by the way, that's how barter and money worked since the dawn of history. Banking was a step BACKWARDS.
Of course. But you're not showing how gold (or even cash) scales to today without reverting society backwards to the localized dawn of history. That's the hard problem. Everyone's going to die anyways someday before ever achieving outliving the universe, so what's any of it matter, right? That's another subject thread you all can start.
personally manage your own money, or let god's choosen master race do it...
Cryptocurrency as prophecied by cypherpunks does not require masters. Of course it's far too soon to suggest any candidates, let alone any coming close to demonstrating such achievement in vivo.
lawl, gold would be the source of that currency's value, so not 'moot' at all. Still, such systems are a FAILURE by design.
The point is, that once you build a system to transmit gold that has as much trust as gold itself, the two become interchangeable in all comparisons, except the former falls off due to one failed comparison, transmissibility.
well yes a honest banking system is theoretically possible. But to get one we need to burn down wall street with all the bankers included. Burn them alive. So who's going to do that?
Honest banking system? Oh pray tell. Islamic finance under Sharia Law? Bankers, gatekeepers, thieves, are hated by most, so they'll burn sooner. Stocks, more generally any vehicle for investment returns, most seem to like that, you'd have propose significantly more attractive or philosophical things to make that burn.
wrong.
Any money is steeped in belief, so too early to tell.
an absurd assumption
Changing the cypherpunk assumption invokes an entirely new thread in which people can discuss what might work in a world without that. And another thread to discuss why their assumption might either be currently or permanently wrong (cannot be made the future status).
gold isn't below 'cryptocurrencies' at all. Except in the minds of 'techno' 'optimists'
When people come up with something to defeat them, those cypherpunks, those maximalists, take it to them, or to the public. Humanity often prefers testing assumptions in real life, both gold and cryptocurrency and cash are out there now, such that debating them is unlikely to have much effect on experiment result.
I'm simply pointing out that your 'digital cash' is worse than gold and that believing that it would 'magically' overthrow governmetn is laughable wishful thinking or worse.
Other than lack of transmissibility, safe storage without [un] trust{ed,able} third parties, assay, etc, etc... gold isn't that bad. As before, use it in your mix to whatever degree you wish.
Crypto is completely vulnerable to a bunch of peopel being thrown in jail for 'money laundering'
That's distributed, and just as hard a task as for "using gold".
a bunch of 'mining farms' being raided, etc
Tor Directory Authorities being raided? Filesharing, cryptocurrencies, Tor, PGP, etc... The stakes simply aren't yet high enough to really begin testing those boundaries. Cypherpunks say they will be, and predict that crypto will win. Time will tell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_East_India_Company
Admiral Ackbar says "It's a trap".