To answer the question, of course there is, but does it mean that one is better than the other?
Gold, beautiful to look at, expensive to buy and a status symbol since it was first discovered. It used to be the measure of wealth for countries as well as individuals and a currency was valued by how much gold was backing it.
No more, ‘the gold standard’ doesn’t apply to the major economies as they all print money as and when they desire (often calling it quantitative easing). In times of economic uncertainty people often buy gold as a hedge against inflation and financial depression.
What happens though if you don’t have savings to protect? Don’t have assets you can liquidate (art, antiques, shares) to put into gold until economic certainty and growth returns? How do you protect your income? Make certain that you can indeed still provide for your family?
That’s a tricky question to answer because for the most part, things are out of your control. If you don’t have assets you can liquidate (sell) you can’t put that money into gold. You could pay into a pension but that will probably be dependent on share prices and dividends, which, in an economic downturn could be worthless.
Bitcoin could be the answer, despite all the negative headlines you see every day; bitcoin is a bubble, bitcoin is a scam, bitcoin is worthless and so on.
Is it though? It launched in 2009 and if you’d invested $10 in 2010 you’d have bought some 3000 bitcoins (slightly more I know) today you’d be worth around $42 million. If you’d invested the same in gold, assuming you could have invested as little as $10, today it would be worth around $12. Not a huge lot of good to you as a way to provide for your family.
We know then that gold is more stable, and bitcoin fluctuates but always seems to keep going up. From that perspective then, bitcoin is more useful the less fiat money or other assets you have.
Now that bitcoin is so expensive of course it’s not as easy to get hold of (unless you get paid in it) and, like gold, is out of reach of most people. Or is it? You can’t mine gold (not easily anyway) but you can mine bitcoin. You don’t even have to have your own expensive mining equipment, you can sign up to a cloud mining service that just sends you the bitcoin (or portions of it). You invest whatever you can afford, always remembering that you should only invest what you can afford to lose and, that this is a long-term strategy. Then you sit back and let the mining commence.
It’s long term because no matter what, cloud mining does not give you quick results, unless you have a lot of money to buy computing power. What it does do it put you in control of some of your financial resources. Once bought, the computing power is there for however long you’ve contracted for.
Just like gold has similar rivals, like silver and platinum. Bitcoin too has rivals like Ethereum, Dash, Litecoin, Monero and others. You can cloud mine all of them and they all have the potential to increase in value.
Cryptocurrencies have one benefit over gold, well maybe more than one;
There is so much more to cryptocurrencies, so I urge you to research and learn. Taking control of your finances is one way to protect yourself from inept politicians and unscrupulous bankers. Don’t you owe it to yourself and your family to at least investigate?
