Ask HN: Why is BTC-Gold price inverted? How can cryptocurrency be worth more?

2 points by rrggrr ↗ HN

1 comment

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First you can compare 1 gold with 1 bitcoin.

It's not clear how to measure gold. 1 gram? 1 kilogram? 1 milligram? 1 tone? 1 ounce? 1 liter? 1 gallon? ...

The arbitrary measurement of the bitcoins is not so obvious. The plan is that the total amount of bitcoins will be 21,000,000, not all of them are yet in circulation. Each day there are 3600 new bitcoins mined.

You can imagine an alternative universe where the total of "bitcoins" is 2,100,000,000 and each day there are 360,000 new mined "bitcoins". (Let's call them "centcoins"). For almost all transactions the alternative word will be equal to the real world, so the 1 in 1 bitcoins is somehow arbitrary too.

What do you want to compare: 1 kilogram of gold vs 1/100 bitcon? 1 ounce of gold vs 1 bitcoin? 1 gallon of gold vs 3600 bitcoins

(Let's call 3600 bitcoins 1 "daycoin".)

(There were some serious proposal to use millibitcoins in all the exchange web sites. The idea is that approximately 1 US$ ~= 1 Euro ~= 1 miliBitcoin, so the exchange is more user frieldly.)

Some "alternative" versions of you question:

* Why do bitcoins have any value at all?

* Is all the (available) gold in the word more value than all the (available) bitcoins?