[Cryptography] cryptography Digest, Vol 93, Issue 18

[jamesd at echeque.com]

On 2021-01-20 05:29, Alex Flanagan wrote:
> "Gold" is worth thinking about as a market. Most gold is traded as paper --
> "here is a receipt, we promise we have this gold on deposit, feel free to
> trade this receipt." And then a mutual fund holds a bunch of deposit
> receipts, people buy fund shares, and say, "I hold gold." I agree: this is
> a hallucination.

The underlying weakness of gold has always been that moving gold around
is dangerous, difficult, and slow.  With the result that you end up
leaving the gold in place and moving ownership of gold around, and if
the owner is distant from the actual gold, you have a problem.

Moving secrets around has an obvious advantage over gold.  The problem
that Satoshi solved was how to give secrets value and how to move them
around.

In the information age, the collective hallucination that secrets have
value works better than the collective hallucination that gold has value
far in excess of its use value.

In the end, fiat always eventually collapses, and gold wins over fiat.
But now, secrets will win over gold.