Luke Groom, a civil engineer, JD-MBA student and part-time strategy associate with Marathon Digital Holdings, has written an opinion editorial highlighting how many of the values of gold bugs overlap with Bitcoin but are often dismissed due to a lack of understanding of Bitcoin’s superiority in terms of its digital ledger. Groom notes that the values espoused by Jordan Peterson and gold bugs, such as personal responsibility and a search for truth, align with Bitcoin’s values. However, the differences between gold and Bitcoin, particularly their ledger properties, must be discussed.
While gold has other uses besides being a monetary unit, such as in cell phone parts and dentistry, gold’s monetary premium is what makes it valuable, and if this premium disappeared, gold’s price would collapse. Additionally, if gold were to become the global unit of account, it would be used even less for nonmonetary purposes due to cost limitations. In contrast, an ideal monetary unit would be portable, durable, accepted, scarce, fungible, divisible and resistant to counterfeiting, and Bitcoin is equal or superior to gold in all these features, except for acceptability.
The use of ledgers to transact money has become necessary in modern commerce, and Bitcoin’s properties as a ledger make it a far superior monetary system to anything in existence. Ledgers must be reliable, unattackable, verifiable, global, accessible, trustworthy, and able to provide fast final settlement. When comparing the ledgers themselves, Bitcoin is far superior to gold. While gold-based systems could encourage monetary responsibility and limit inflation, gold bugs have not provided any prevalent suggestions to improve the U.S. dollar ledger system.
Furthermore, gold bugs have not provided any meaningful suggestions about how to avoid the problems of debasement, which have been a constant for centuries. The ledger-based-gold-backed-banking system has been used in Europe since the 12th and 13th centuries, but each country has seen the corruption of the ledger, the failure of their currency, or the debasement of gold. In contrast, Bitcoin provides an elegant solution to both the unit and the ledger. The unit provides all the characteristics of sound money, and the ledger is reliable, unattackable, verifiable, global, accessible, provides fast final settlement, and is trustworthy.
Groom concludes by acknowledging the respect he has for gold bugs, and even owns a modest amount of gold himself. However, he asks Peterson, Sebag, and Schiff to consider the differences between gold and Bitcoin and recognize Bitcoin’s superiority in terms of its digital ledger.
