With the Forbes online article this week interviewing Rob McEwen, once again we are given a glimpse at Bitcoin's potential to unseat gold.
The billionaire head of McEwen Mining and previous owner of Goldcorp conceded that "it's a mistake to write off bitcoin as a bubble or fad."
And industry insider Naval Ravikant of AngelList goes further saying that "All the things that gold does, Bitcoin does better."
Leading some to the conclusion that bitcoin is "gold on steroids."
Indeed, Gold, the ancient currency was once prized for how easy it is to recognize and transport and how difficult it is to counterfeit. But in this global economy, the weight of gold is now its greatest burden.
Gold is a nightmare to transport and impossible to send over the internet.
While bitcoin has the very sci-fi aspect of brain storage, Bitcoins unlike any other money, can be stored just in your mind.
Clearly helpful if you're crossing government borders.
Further, modern counterfeiters have challenged the most pristine aspect of gold, with many recent forgeries being crafted with Tungsten, an element with nearly the same density as gold.
In a recent case in New York, hundreds of thousand of dollars were lost to complex tungsten-based gold forgeries.
Indeed, as Bitcoin appears entirely exempt from counterfeiting, its wider use could save billions in policing and loses from forgery.
Bitcoin and Gold are often compared in terms of scarcity. Creating true deflationary currencies.
But while new gold can always be pulled from the ground, Bitcoin has a hard limit of 21 million.
And once reached no more will ever be produced.
While its possible to subdivide each bitcoin into millions of units called Satoshi's to maintain its fluidity, even Satoshi's have a fixed and hard limit.
With all this, it appears that gold might be running into the same pitfalls that newspapers and music companies felt when hit by digital online alternatives.
It appears that with crypto-technology, for the first time in history, gold has finally met its match.
When it comes to inflation, transport, trust, counterfeiting, and usability, Bitcoin stacks up pretty good against the precious metal.
So... as gold prices tank in recent months, one can only wonder if Bitcoin's surge & Cyprus's troubles have anything to do with the fall.
And others have suggested that as Bitcoin's price multiplies ever higher...
bringing the masses into the fold, whether we are seeing the beginning of the world's first digital gold rush.
This piece was re-shot based on the original version "Bitcoin vs. Gold", 1 week ago. We re-shot and edited to fix some errata and include some updates.