by Roy Sebag
Gold Money
An inquiry into the monetary fitness of bitcoin relative to gold
INTRODUCTION
Since their creation in 2009, novel cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin have been met with skepticism and excitement. In recent years bitcoin proponents have begun to argue that their man-made technology service exhibits monetary fitness which is equal or, perhaps, superior to that of gold. The bitcoin community has begun advocating that ordinary savers should “drop gold”, which has served as the tangible money of man for thousands of years, for bitcoin, which they esteem to be a supersessory version of gold, acting, in their words, as “digital gold.” In this paper, we will investigate the attributes of bitcoin and, more specifically, bitcoin mining to test whether or not these claims are valid.