Gold vs Bitcoin - with Roy Sebag and Saifedean Ammous 

It’s probably laced with crack.

He had to start smoking because he was stressed out trying to debate Saif

@@c.a.parlay657 Or he decided to relax when he realized Unsaifadean don't know a thing, anyone can claim anything to fit a narrative thinks logically not emotionally!

Roy is just displaying a cigarette has more utility than a bitcoin.

@@hazadus3 Especially in prison

Saifaden is a genius yes

Yes I agree with. I have sold my Bitcoins long ago, but I do own some other cryptos on a cold, cold wallet. I also have some gold and silver stacked in the mines of Moria. I see the arguments every time -- lets just get along and be friends, can we?

Let’s say we take your advice and go 50% allocation to gold and the other 50% to bitcoin. If you did this on the day this video was uploaded, you would be down immensely. The time to dump gold for bitcoin was 10 years ago.

Andrei Simon battle of the bubbles

Exactly. He is obsessed with his requirement of materialism. Go ask the music industry if .wav/.mp3 files are real goods. Whether or not those files are contained on CD makes no difference these days. So, were they once real goods because they couldn't be easily copied by the masses in the 80's / 90's, but now no longer are?

Right. That would be like saying an MP3 (digital music) has no value. Well it’s about 1.49

Are files on a computer money?

@@krishbox private keys on the computer are locks to a vault of money stored on the chain.

@@krishbox yes Bitcoin

@Burt Gummer value is subjective. People see value in Bitcoin, clearly. You have to argue why people are wrong I’m seeing the value that they see.

Dear Silence, your response is the reason I do what I do. I try to share good information and the knowledge I have gained in the hopes that others will gain or improve on that knowledge. In your response I see just that and I am relieved to see that you understood the essence of my arguments. Too many in the bitcoin community have discounted their common sense due to their passions. All the best, Roy

Your money has tarnished if you bought silver instead of bitcoin

Yes. According to Saifedean, any historic period of market activity can be reduced to his personal explanation. An explanation which he is so certain of he is unwilling to consider an alternative explanation. When it comes to silver, two serious market participants (myself and Mark) tried to politely show Saifedean that his analysis was incorrect but he did not allow that criticism to cloud his self-assurance. Somewhat disappointingly, this is the kind of approach academic economists have taken to rewrite history when it comes to Fiat money. I am not saying that's what Saifedean did as he is clearly in the good camp when it comes to recognizing the problems with fiat. The issue is he still clings to this academic economist quantitive method of analyzing the past with great confidence. The result is a poor analysis which misses the natural order and unchanging truths. Moreover, it is a terrible foundation upon which to argue for bitcoin.

@@roysebag2723 I agree, there are much better ways to argue in favour of Bitcoin. Unfortunately these ways would mean many Bitcoiners would have abandon the current "Bitcoin is hard money" and "Bitcoin is a commodity" narrative (which is provably factually incorrect) and admit that Bitcoin is a form of privately issued fiat currency. Now at that level there could be a very meritocratic argument made in favour of it. But they always have and will refuse to make that initial concession because they have somehow convinced themselves that fiat money is evil, therefore Bitcoin cannot be fiat (even though it clearly is according to the basic definition of fiat).

silver more can be mined to drive down the price not the same with bit coin

@@matti1003 "Bitcoin is a form of privately issued fiat currency". OK fine; but its "stock to flow" ratio is fixed, and the total supply will be limited (to 21 million BTC). Name ANY other "fiat currency" in the world for which the supply is fixed (there USED to be such currencies, but they don't exist as such any more).

@@matti1003 Fiat means "by decree". By whose decree is Bitcoin's use as money mandated?

lol I was going to say the same thing when he pulled that bcash card it was epic

If you don't have internet, go borrow a friend's phone.

@@KonaChuck22 In an emergency situation no one has a phone with internet connection.

the internet was designed to survive a nuclear holocaust.

The choice here is between gold and bitcoin; so what if your gold is in a vault, and you can't get to the vault, or communicate with the vault operators? The answer, I would say, is to keep some fiat cash on hand; and Jim Rickards would recommend keeping some one-ounce silver coins around the house also.

You're right Bitcoin will just slow you down while you rush to the grocer with 3 ounces of gold in your pocket to purchase supplies to survive the impending emergency. God speed!

I like Bitcoin a lot it reminds me of a my little pony, only a pony you buy watch and hold and it grows and eventually it is designed to give you a free ride, but I think Gold is better, since it doesn't store hopes and dreams like bitcoin, I think Gold will win out of the next century and bitcoin will break it's legs and die a slow painful death.

gold has a market cap of 11T. out of which let's say 2T is industrial use case. what is the other 9T??????

@@iulianserban10 This is a major sticking point people make against gold. You need to understand that gold's industrial applications have been substituted because of it's history as money. It is significant that any form of money have a stable above ground supply, i.e not consumed. Substitute gold with any of the other noble metals , Rhodium, platinum, palladium , silver all of which are intrinsic stores of value as industrial metals , are resistant to decay and entropy and are precious rare materials. Oil is far closer to a store of value money. Bitcoin is a superior form of currency than fiat but is nothing resembling money.

How did you get to the conclusion that BTC does not represent a store of value ? if we look at the timeslot 3 years ago when this interview took place versus today, BTC is up over 150% in value. Gold is much less. So how come BTC is not a store of value ?

So true lol

Do you agree that bitcoin is a service? Because Saifedean rejected that point. If you do agree Bitcoin is a service, as defined by Von Mises by being immaterial and ordered within the concept of "economic goods" that is very helpful. With that correct definition of what bitcoin is, we can then return to the notion of goods being a useful physical object that is ordered within the laws of causal relations. Next, we can inquire as to how a service (as a lower ordered action) can cause, price, or be traded for a good of higher order. Bringing in Aristotle again, we can see this fails on multiple levels. It fails because a household will never measure their action and cooperate under a lower level service. It also fails because money arises from the usefulness of a good which is it's final nature. If a service is meant to merely be money, not only is it lower in the order of economic activity but it does not meet the Aristotelean definition of money as money cannot be desired as a thing in and of itself. Personally, I am not an Austrian but I am happy with Aristotelean definition of the goals of a household, prosperity, and laws of causality. I see a troubling invocation of the Austrian School by bit coiners who have failed to distinguish between meditations on the concept of money (by Von Mises, Rothbard etc.) and the original definition of what money is (by Menger via Aristotle) upon which those meditations were based. Moreover, the idea that Austrians couldn't have predicted the digital age is a dangerous re-interpretation. Digital just means fiat and while bit coiners may believe they are special and live in the most advanced age with infinite wisdom, the attempts to subvert, invert, or manipulate the real economy with the abstract ideas of the mind has plagued human societies for thousands of years. Indeed, this was one of the central themes in the Aristotelian corpus.

@@roysebag2723 ​ I've got from Mises' Human Action that a service is a consumer good (a good of the first order): economic goods which in themselves are fitted to satisfy human wants directly and whose serviceableness does not depend on the cooperation of other economic goods. But Mises did not say it explicitly anywhere. If I understand you correctly you, in a sophisticated way, use already in bitcoin circles known 'argument of the apocalypse' or 'internet-shutdown argument' which says that bitcoin is useless when civilization reverts to more basic state or the world where the Internet will be shut down. Yes, in that case, bitcoin will probably be useless in my opinion. I think Saifedean addressed this argument somewhere.

Roy Sebag bitcoin is not a service. You can call it a protocol. You can call it a network. You got demolished in this. He wore you out like a rag doll. You are a mental midget in this. You need to beg this guy to take down this video because he made you look like fool the whole time.

@@roysebag2723 The bitcoin network provides a service by moving the commodity bitcoin. You are conflating the bitcoin network with the commodity called bitcoin.

​@@roysebag2723 To answer your first question. Is bitcoin a service, i.e. a nonphysical intangible good? A service is an intangible good stipulated by a contract and is ultimately not immutable like a physical thing. It can be destroyed, removed from existence. Is bitcoin physical? In a way, it is. It is physically stored on many computers around the world. Is that functional uniqueness of particular physical bits on the ledger immutable (not uniqueness in a physical sense because there are copies of ledger)? It is only as far as the Bitcoin network exists and functions. That is why bitcoin is referred to as digital scarcity. Can the Bitcoin network stop functioning? It could in case of the collapse of civilization. Therefore bitcoin is not ultimately immutable like a physical thing but on the scale of total immutability on the one side and the total malleability on the other side, it is the most immutable service ever created to the point it could be seen by some as having almost physical certainty.

It's not factually false, and he did address it by stating that bitcoin is the means of payment to miners in the form of tx fees. Also, and this was not mentioned, space on an immutable ledger is undoubtedly a commodity.

Holding gold over bitcoin has proven to be disastrous since this debate was published

@@BTCNSDAP Both have done well. The disaster has been the US dollar.

@@BTCNSDAP Both have done well, and holding both is prudent. The disaster has been the US dollar.

Dunning Kruger right here. If I say Gold is the new silver, you won’t get it. You need to read Seifidean’s book to understand.

Peace be upon you, I advise you to trade with Mrs Linda she will assist you make huge profits in trading.

+1"2"0"9"5"1"0"5"7"5"1

Text her on whatsapp

Exactly. It's a shame that point was lost on Saifedean. Within the real world, the goods (made-up of elements) allow us to truly express our human action. Every good is truly owned (at hand) and can be truly improved/exchanged etc. Within that real world of economic activity, gold is and will always be money. For that to change, the laws of nature would need to change. All things equal, a good will never be traded for a service because the service is lower in its importance than a good. In our upside-down world with unlimited fiat monetary debasement this feature gets missed. Within the real world economy, goods, even those that may be more immediately important (food/energy), will be traded for Gold as a good within the natural world which begins becomes the measure and reward for all other goods (while never losing its original usefulness). A service, which is abstract, can never provide the same expression of human action as a good in hand. A service limits its users to what they can do and in the process ends up consuming their resources. It's no different than a fiat monetary system enforced by the government which places itself between every economic transaction. The beauty of the natural order is that it provided us with Gold as truly independent money. A good which can be used anywhere and anytime to cooperate and achieve prosperity.

whatever, i buy most things online, ordered my groceries yesterday, just ordered a single bicycle tire. I also ordered some facial sponges from china.

Roy agreeing with this idiot. Lol. Roy is training to be Peter Schiff only he’s not half as smart.

@@roysebag2723 A good will never be traded for a service? That happens everyday here on planet earth. Besides, bitcoin is a real commodity. As real as gold. Ask the CME. Ask the IRS. Ask most governments on planet earth.The really real bitcoin commodity is traded freely between people in the real world economy. And as a valued and scarce commodity, it can easily function as money. It is nothing like a fiat money system. Bitcoin is not money by government decree forced between every transaction, it is free market money, used voluntarily by people. There is nothing forced about it. Nice strawman, Roy. :-) Bitcoin fits beautifully into the natural order of things. Its a shame you have a chip on your shoulder because you bet on the scam bitcoin cash and lost big.

Your ignorance is astonishing.

Math as measure (arithmetic) is just a language predicated on the notion of number (arithmos) whereby my mind, aided by my sense perceptions, counts things in the real world. Historically that act was inexorably linked to weighing as numbers may help specify an object but weight provides stability and rest (satisfaction). The math behind bitcoin is entirely different. It's an amalgamation of axioms and inferences of rules predicated on symbol manipulation. Cryptography is an even more complex amalgamation of the "block chain" of those axioms and rules over the last hundred years. But the history of mathematics shows that within pure mathematics, rules will change (and often). Building an open system upon a cryptographic understanding from 2009 assumes those underlying theories and rules never change. I am personally not convinced of that certainty. It's not the same kind of certainty we have in the natural world.

@@roysebag2723 Bitcoin is a real commodity, and is accepted as such. You not being convinced of that will be a loss for you. Maybe go hold hands with Aristotle, who had such an amazing grasp of economics. :-)

Roy Sebag thank you for your dissertation on math. The weight that gives you satisfaction that something is real, is bounded by the same rules that govern the universe, which also governs bitcoin. Energy. In my mind, the presence of energy is what makes things real. Whether or not I can touch it, is pointless to me. As long as there was energy used to create it, than it is real. So Bitcoin is not backed by the “faith” in mathematics as you stated, but rather being mathematically measured to its existence in the real world, i.e. being used as money. However, I do agree with you that future cryptography is unsure, which would cause Bitcoin to use its energy differently than it is today. If the market then decides that this transfer of energy (change in cryptography) doesn’t have the same measurement to the real world as it once did, then it will be reflected in its decline in use as money. Future advancement in cryptography doesn’t mean Bitcoin doesn’t exist in the natural world and that it cannot be used as money.

@@c.a.parlay657 Your definition of energy is meaningless if you speak of it without a physical tether. That is the energy of voodoo mysticism. Physical energy is measured, objectively, physically as work/motion/thermal heat. You have absolutely no way of saying 1 unit of bitcoin measures 1 Kj of energy. That energy was wasted to produce bitcoin can be measured at the mine level, but the energy is now gone and you have nothing objective (which can be measured) according the laws of thermodynamics.

Roy Sebag wasted energy is subjective and the fact that you believe energy is be gone, shows that the only voodoo here are your responses trying to mask the lack of understanding in this field. To paraphrase Satoshi, if you don’t get it by now, I don’t have the time to explain it to you.

56:28

No. That would be you and Roy.

The market currently values BTrash at less than 2.5% of bitcoin. Idiots participate in markets. They buy meth... BTrash is for the brain damaged people who think payment systems are where the value is. Apparently they never heard of Visa or PayPal. You have to be an idiot like Roy to be in that camp.

yeah poor take. that isn't correct.

We have seen how these forks have played out. Each successive fork is worth less than the previous one, and they are all losing value against Bitcoin.

There are many forks out there? Why haven't they overtaken bitcoin number 1 spot? Why are their marketcap still low ? LOL

You should probably read about Bitcoin's proof of work. Creating bitcoin also requires a lot of energy.

@@iansiebert Bitcoin requires energy to define itself. It's powered into existence. Gold just is... Gold mining reflects an entirely different set of actions and opportunity costs.

Dunning Kruger right here as well. Idiot doesn’t know why gold was money and why it’s like the new silver.

yeah you should read more.

You need to do some research

Anyone who listened to saif and took his advice, simply just at the time this debate was published, they’d be 10x more wealthy than if they bought gold

Naaaa lol

bitcoin, of the people? don’t get me laugh

If gold is the money of central banks then why has it been abandoned in favor of fiat? What the hell are you talking about?

@@HaleFire7 He's almost certainly saying that, as a matter of fact gold is what central banks own and settle debts to each other with. It's because it's scarce, so it has value (they understand this well). The TLDR -- Fiat is made for spending, gold is made for saving. In other words, gold is preferred by bankers and savvy savers / investors; while fiat is for consumers, that is, people who either can't, don't want to, or don't understand why they should, save their money. It sounds mean but it's true. Why would a central bank hold gold? To preserve their wealth over time. Why would they use fiat? To give it to the nation's consumers to spend, as they consume their wealth and "stimulate the economy" which is what Keynesian central bankers want them to do. Have you noticed how over longer time scales fiat currencies tend to lose their value? To the extent that consumers are unaware of this, the loss of value of fiat over the years (ie inflation without wage growth), is a form of hidden tax. It's a way for central banks/governments to take the wealth that citizens generate through their time and energy and labor. The only protection citizens have from this hidden tax is to own scarce assets. Hopefully this helps. @Bob Arsenault 's comment above of bitcoin being 'the people's money' (ie better than gold) takes a bit more study/research to understand, I won't try to convince you of it. If you own gold and hold it yourself, that's pretty good too; but I agree in some ways bitcoin is superior. One reason is that, when secured properly it's harder for governments or thieves to steal from you. (Just google Executive Order 6102, if you want an example of gold confiscation)

how he got execiuted ? with the other guy talking like he is my grandpa about phySICAL THINGS in the yeAR 2020?

It's clearly a service , ask yourself this, if you got a bitcoin and nobody else in the world thinks it's worth anything, how can you extract any value from it? You can't thus proving it's service and not a good, with your gold you can extract value from a variety of ways despite everyone thinking it's worthless, thus establishing itself a good. So it is not Roy who has no logical reasoning it's in fact yourself.

​@@michaelherrera116 dude asking those questions won't take u anywhere. the right question is to ask why u think bitcoin would worth paying for. whats its advantages its disadvantages , where it helps us where it hurts us. what it solves what it doesn't. price is relevant to those things bro. same with gold. exactly the same. so tell me why would people think bitcoin doesn't worth anything..

@@user-qp9gx9cf8p Bitcoin doesn't solve shit, and I asked the right questions you just choose to ignore them

​@@michaelherrera116 its a stupid question though! ur ignorance is irritating.. go visit a few countries that 70 per cent of people are unbanked ... but even most of them who don't have anything not even clothes t wear still own a smart phone. satoshi let them participate in the global economy.. if u don't care about africans lets go somewhere closer.. I am from Greece and a few years ago they forced us with capital controls... I had bitcoin....CAN U IMAGINE WHAT IT SOLVED ? if not think again... u think its ok to say bullshit to the world but sometimes better chew ur gum than talk... bitcoin saved a few people in Cyprus also.. when the government took all the money of peoples accounts by law.... unfortunately back then it was only a few who already knew what bitcoin solves.. sure it wouldn't be u.... lets go to value transfer. if I send u a million dollars from Greece in euros how much will the bank take for fees.. lets say now I transfer u bitcoin.. how much will the miner take for fees.. (its mathematics but this gold bagger who smokes on the video doesn't trust them haahah) lets keep on.. how fast will they arrive t u.. u are in an emergency and I need t send u money.. I will transfer it t u by bank or I ll put a gold plate on the plane t u.. hopefully in a few days u ll have them..(the gold probably not, the cash hopefully yes after a few days and a few questions from the bank.. ) if I sent u bitcoin it would be there in an instance.. There would be no chance of losing them on the way.. zero ..sO WHAT DOES IT SOLVE? plus a million things I am tired to write cause u don't even care. so it will be a waste of my time.. even my time has value.. nothing is free how can u even believe people should think something worths zero.. in conclusion u choose t stay behind.. its the human instinct .. to stick t what you know..what feels safe.. thats why people die so the next generation comes to advance our civilisation. Cause if they didn't we would still be in the Stone Age. they felt safe back then.. in America there would still be slaves.. cause back then they though that black people worth shit... cause I am sure u don't even care what bitcoin solves,. and unfortunately in order for u t get ur pride back u prefer it to fall rather than let it try at least and save those who really need it..

@@user-qp9gx9cf8p Ahhh bitcoin is out to save all the poor people unbanked, imagine them buying bitcoin and spending 70% of their entire savings on the fees, because clowns like you thought you could buy a my little pony take it him and watch it rise up and give you a ride to all your dreams. Think again!

Is it really a greater fool theory if it keeps working? When does it stop being a greater fools theory? I would love to know.

@@frank-2977 It's about the fundamentals. Most cryptos are backed in nothing. Any day you could wake up to find the government has made it illegal. Illegal to own, Illegal for sites like coinbase to sell. It's a rigged game. It already happened in poker. People woke up on a Friday to find out online poker was illegal. Hundreds of thousands of people had to wait years to get their money. I guess people that aren't paying attention maybe deserve to lose their money. People that are paying attention are buying assets with NO Counter Party Risk.

@@frank-2977 What is something worth if you can't sell it. It's worth the value of it's utility. Therefore all cryptos backed in nothing will go to their intrinsic value... ZERO.

@@69TDUB Well there is something you seem to forget. Bitcoin is a decentralized tehcnology, which means that they cannot shut down a company or make it illegal in a country, to stop it completely. Its a peer to peer technology, which means you transact from person to person. Basically you are sending information through the internet. How do you make sending information illegal? Besides, at this point bitcoin is not significant enough to pose a real threat to government money. So i'd doubt they are going to ban it. But as it grows larger, more people join and that makea it even harder to ban as you dont want to upset the crowd. Were witnessing the pwoer of the crowd today with the riots. As for gold, there was a time the government banned gold, making it illegal to own. So i dont really get ur point here..

@@69TDUB So far bitcoins are valued at 9500 dollars per bitcoin by the market. You cannot agree or disagree with the market, this is just a fact. If the market decides something has value u would be rrally ignorant to deny that. Money is basically confidence, and that confidence in bitcoin is growing everyday.