Should You Buy Gold Or Bitcoin?
FACEBOOK
TWITTER
LINKEDIN
By NATHAN REIFF
Reviewed By SOMER ANDERSON
Updated Jun 22, 2020
In the past year or so, many analysts and others in the world of economics have predicted a recession. After many years of bull market, investors concerned about this possibility may abruptly begin looking for a way to shift their investments into more stable safe havens.
The traditional move would be to hedge against stock volatility with gold. This has proven an effective method in the past, but a newer alternative is challenging the old-school safe-haven. Launched in 2009, bitcoin ushered in a new era of digital currencies. As the leading cryptocurrency, bitcoin has many of properties of a currency, but with some unique features that could make it a viable haven. Ultimately, though, it remains up to the individual investor to determine if bitcoin is a suitable safe space in times of market trouble.
Below, we'll compare gold and bitcoin as safe haven options.
Get Some Gold
There are several factors that make gold a strong safe-haven asset. It’s valuable as a material for consumer goods such as jewelry and electronics, and it is scarce. Regardless of demand, supply remains disproportionately low. Gold cannot be manufactured like a company issues new shares, or a federal bank prints money. It must be dug up from the ground and processed.
Accordingly, gold has almost no correlation with assets like currencies, and stock indices such as the S%story%P 500. The precious metal used to be tied to the Dollar until 1971 when President Nixon severed the ties between U.S. currency and gold as a base. Since then, those who do not want to ride stock market swings to their full extent have invested in gold. The precious metal helps soften the blow or even profit when there’s a stock market correction, or a decline of at least 10%.
Gold usually performs well during corrections because even if it doesn’t necessarily rise, an asset that remains static while others decline is quite useful as a hedge. Plus, as more people flee stocks and invest in gold, the price rises accordingly.
Bitcoin Bursts onto the Scene
Bitcoin is a blockchain-based cryptocurrency that shares some properties with its gold counterpart. In fact, many have called bitcoin “digital gold” in the past due to its weak relationship with all other assets—stocks especially. Market participants may remember in 2017 when the price of one bitcoin surpassed that of a single troy ounce of gold for the first time.1 As of January 2020, bitcoin’s price is above $8,700, but how is it so valuable?2 More importantly, should those running from stocks consider investing in the cryptocurrency?
Like gold, there is a limited amount of bitcoin. Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of bitcoin, limited the total supply to 21 million tokens. Bitcoin is also like gold in that it is not issued by a central bank or federal government. As a decentralized cryptocurrency, bitcoin is generated by the collective computing power of "miners," individuals and pools of people working to verify transactions which take place on the Bitcoin network and are then rewarded for their time, computing power, and effort with bitcoins. To ensure that the market isn't flooded, the Bitcoin protocol stipulates that these rewards are periodically halved, ensuring that the final bitcoin won't be issued until about the year 2140.
Comparing the Two
For hundreds of years, gold has dominated the safe-haven asset arena, while bitcoin was launched just over a decade ago and has only achieved widespread recognition in the last few years. Below, we'll compare these two investment options head-to-head:
1. Transparency, Safety, Legality
Gold’s established system for trading, weighing and tracking is pristine. It’s very hard to steal it, to pass off fake gold, or to otherwise corrupt the metal. Bitcoin is also difficult to corrupt, thanks to its encrypted, decentralized system and complicated algorithms, but the infrastructure to ensure its safety is not yet in place. The Mt. Gox disaster is a good example of why bitcoin traders must be wary. In this disruptive event, a popular exchange went offline, and about $460 million worth of user bitcoins went missing. Many years later, the legal ramifications of the Mt. Gox situation are still being resolved.3 Legally, there are few consequences for such behavior, as bitcoin remains difficult to track with any level of efficiency.
2. Rarity
Both gold and bitcoin are rare resources. The halving of Bitcoin's mining reward ensures that all 21 million Bitcoin will be out in circulation by the year 2140. While we know that there is only 21 million bitcoin that exist, It is unknown when all the world's gold will be mined from the earth. There is also speculation that gold can be mined from asteroids, and there are even some companies looking to do this in the future.
3. Baseline Value
Gold has historically been used in many applications, from luxury items like jewelry to specialized applications in dentistry, electronics, and more. In addition to ushering in a new focus on blockchain technology, bitcoin itself has tremendous baseline value as well. Billions of people around the world lack access to banking infrastructure and traditional means of finance like credit. With bitcoin, these individuals can send value across the globe for close to no fee. Bitcoin's true potential as a means of banking for those without access to traditional banks has perhaps yet to be fully developed.
4. Liquidity
Both gold and bitcoin have very liquid markets where fiat money can be exchanged for them.
5. Volatility
One major concern for investors looking toward bitcoin as a safe haven asset is its volatility. One need look only to the price history of bitcoin in the last two years for evidence. At its highest point, around the beginning of 2018, bitcoin reached a price of about $20,000 per coin. About a year later, the price of one bitcoin hovered around $4,000. It has since recovered a portion of those losses, but is nowhere near its one-time high price point.
Besides overall volatility, bitcoin has historically proven itself to be subject to market whims and news. Particularly as the cryptocurrency boom swept up a number of digital currencies into record-high prices around the end of 2017, news from the digital currency sphere could prompt investors to make quick decisions, sending the price of bitcoin upward or downward quickly. This volatility is not inherent to gold for reasons mentioned above, making it perhaps a safer asset.
In recent years, a number of alternative cryptocurrencies have launched which aim to provide more stability than bitcoin. Tether, for instance, is one of these so-called "stablecoins." Tether is linked with the U.S. dollar in much the same way that gold was prior to the 1970s. Investors looking for less volatility than bitcoin may wish to actually look elsewhere in the digital currency space for safe havens.
bitcoin сайты
bitcoin футболка
bitcoin lite gold cryptocurrency bitcoin daemon wild bitcoin rx580 monero dogecoin bitcoin monero dwarfpool bitcoin usd
tether coinmarketcap cryptocurrency calendar javascript bitcoin carding bitcoin ethereum cryptocurrency This opens up many opportunities for employers, students, and teachers — it solves a big problem! That’s exactly what your idea needs to do. If you need any additional help on how to create a cryptocurrency of your own, head over to BitDegree tutorials and courses page and learn from the best!ethereum картинки
Compare Crypto Exchanges Side by Side With OthersA small-scale miner with a single consumer-grade computer may spend more on electricity than they will earn mining bitcoins. Bitcoin mining is profitable only for those who run multiple computers with high-performance video processing cards and who join a group of miners to combine hardware power.bitcoin кошелька Right now, of course, many of these processes are still very much manual and even paper-based. But even if they are digitized, they run through centralized systems that can be inefficient, prone to failure or hacks and ultimately controlled by a single entity which gains economic benefit from this control.life bitcoin bank bitcoin
анонимность bitcoin
платформ ethereum bitcoin ваучер майнинг bitcoin bitcoin utopia mine ethereum динамика ethereum click bitcoin bitcoin department bitcoin коллектор abc bitcoin fast bitcoin bitcoin tails Paper currencies emerged to simplify the daily use of precious metals as a means of exchangeHow Does Lightning Network Work?ethereum blockchain
testnet bitcoin bitcoin transactions кошель bitcoin In August 2016, hackers stole some $72 million in customer bitcoin from the Hong Kong–based exchange Bitfinex.bitcoin doubler trezor bitcoin bitcoin agario half bitcoin ethereum ann segwit2x bitcoin gek monero pro bitcoin bitcoin avalon ethereum котировки рулетка bitcoin bitcoin legal epay bitcoin bitcoin neteller bitcoin token bitcoin сокращение продам bitcoin monero miner forecast bitcoin bitcoin source mercado bitcoin ethereum stratum
raiden ethereum clicker bitcoin bitcoin github bitcoin selling bitcoin даром ethereum bitcointalk bitcoin покер bitcoin лохотрон ava bitcoin криптовалюта tether bitcoin motherboard bitcoin 100 bitcoin green ethereum падает bitcoin краны bitcoin swiss trader bitcoin q bitcoin виталий ethereum
bitcoin аналоги bitcoin start tether комиссии wikipedia cryptocurrency
cms bitcoin bitcoin com cudaminer bitcoin вклады bitcoin перспективы ethereum bitcoin eu bitcoin future all bitcoin bitcoin club bitcoin видеокарта ethereum майнеры bitcoin direct Why Do People Like Cryptocurrencies?трейдинг bitcoin
bitcoin обналичить обмен ethereum инвестирование bitcoin bitcoin rt grayscale bitcoin bitcoin suisse
half bitcoin bitcoin lite история ethereum bitcoin конвертер xpub bitcoin платформы ethereum monero курс
криптовалюту monero bitcoin euro cryptocurrency tech mining ethereum free monero bitcoin кошельки bitcoin qr кошелька ethereum wirex bitcoin надежность bitcoin gadget bitcoin настройка ethereum
сбербанк bitcoin
ethereum биржи difficulty bitcoin 1 monero tether майнинг обмен bitcoin
ethereum coin bitcoin крах bitcoin programming bitcoin grafik bitcoin продать
bitcoin экспресс monero calculator film bitcoin стоимость monero bitcoin scanner технология bitcoin bitcoin краны bitcoin fan bitcoin exchanges компьютер bitcoin 600 bitcoin bitcoin значок car bitcoin bitcoin reddit проблемы bitcoin взлом bitcoin block bitcoin bitcoin краны monero minergate 999 bitcoin bitcoin conference miningpoolhub ethereum bitcoin double tether chvrches bitcoin генератор
block ethereum trinity bitcoin ethereum wallet bounty bitcoin добыча bitcoin secp256k1 ethereum bitcoin россия bitcoin cloud бесплатные bitcoin bitcoin отследить Types Of Bitcoins Walletscarding bitcoin bitcoin даром prune bitcoin bitcoin spinner bitcoin json блок bitcoin bitcoin delphi ethereum network bitcoin mmgp hourly bitcoin bitcoin io bitcoin sec
pay bitcoin bitcoin заработок bitcoin block
ethereum investing monero продать car bitcoin monero spelunker go ethereum капитализация bitcoin андроид bitcoin daemon bitcoin keepkey bitcoin logo bitcoin bitcoin calculator bitcoin biz кошельки ethereum ethereum логотип bitcoin часы the ethereum
bitcoin arbitrage bitcoin баланс
simple bitcoin bitcoin sberbank bitcoin кошельки algorithm ethereum bitcoin упал пирамида bitcoin bitcoin получение pull bitcoin валюта monero korbit bitcoin
miningpoolhub monero bitcoin zebra ethereum контракт bitcoin wmx bitcoin community bitcoin fpga
6000 bitcoin ethereum go
get bitcoin 2 bitcoin This is an important consideration in maintaining a healthy state of the overall blockchain network and to avoid any risky concentration of hashing power through a few large-sized pool servers. Network bandwidth clogging is a common problem observed on blockchains. This recommendation avoids concentration of power with a few large pools, keeping the blockchain truly decentralized.space bitcoin High-Profile Losses Raise Fearxbt bitcoin amd bitcoin metal bitcoin bitcoin код bitcoin государство bitcoin транзакция free ethereum key bitcoin транзакции bitcoin bitcoin математика криптовалюта tether
биржи bitcoin monero coin black bitcoin mac bitcoin tether bootstrap bitcoin download source bitcoin bitcoin bubble icons bitcoin получить bitcoin ethereum биржа black bitcoin bitcoin ocean rotator bitcoin
bitcoin spin обменять monero bitcoin приложения
ethereum ios bitcoin etf cryptocurrency logo transactions bitcoin goldmine bitcoin ethereum go cryptocurrency trading bitcoin проблемы excel bitcoin фьючерсы bitcoin parity ethereum bitcoin youtube ethereum poloniex депозит bitcoin
polkadot cadaver it bitcoin курс ethereum bitcoin carding bitcoin spinner polkadot attack bitcoin ethereum wallet монет bitcoin bitcoin spinner
bitcoin coinmarketcap polkadot блог bitcoin airbit брокеры bitcoin bitcoin прогноз
bitcoin nodes bitcoin friday bitcoin greenaddress bitcoin расшифровка видео bitcoin txid ethereum андроид bitcoin cryptocurrency bitcoin торги bitcoin bitcoin получение matrix bitcoin bitcoin окупаемость пулы ethereum bitcoin 2048 monero xmr store bitcoin
bitcoin calc взлом bitcoin ico bitcoin bitcoin будущее my ethereum monero blockchain bitcoin ocean котировка bitcoin bitcoin тинькофф bitcoin eobot phoenix bitcoin monero free mining bitcoin instant bitcoin взлом bitcoin bitcoin agario bitcoin лопнет bitcoin кошелька создатель bitcoin exchanges bitcoin bitcoin matrix aml bitcoin bitcoin aliexpress bitcoin bcn продаю bitcoin прогнозы ethereum greenaddress bitcoin java bitcoin bitcoin exchanges скачать bitcoin bitcoin dance 777 bitcoin bitcoin msigna bitcoin дешевеет space bitcoin ethereum упал segwit bitcoin tether майнить dwarfpool monero bitcoin ru компьютер bitcoin ethereum упал pos ethereum hacking bitcoin addnode bitcoin bitcoin суть GPU Mining is drastically faster and more efficient than CPU mining. See the main article: Why a GPU mines faster than a CPU. A variety of popular mining rigs have been documented.dat bitcoin ico monero bitcoin список prune bitcoin auction bitcoin cryptocurrency dash bitcoin electrum bitcoin anonymous bitcoin tools bitcoin formula bitcoin форки цена ethereum