Hello fellow Steemians and Crypto investors,
As I have been writing about for some time crypto seems to be siphoning off gold’s market cap. Bitcoin could increase 50x in price by stealing Gold’s thunder.
I found this very interesting article from Bloomberg Tech this morning describing how "preppers", some of the most hardcore Gold bugs out there, are beginning to diversify into Bitcoin and crypto currencies.
Is Crypto in a bubble, is Gold about to lose %50 of its market cap to crypto? What do you think?
Enjoy the article and don't forget to leave your comments bellow!
Trolls are welcome. Comment at will!
Bloomberg Technology
By Eddie Van Der Walt
November 20, 2017, 12:00 AM EST
- Doomsday preppers in North America bet on bitcoin
- Cryptocurrency is starting to impinge on gold's appeal
Wendy McElroy is ready for most doomsday scenarios: a one-year supply of nonperishable food is stacked in a cellar at her farm in rural Ontario. Her blueprint for survival also depends upon working internet: part of her money, assuming she needs some after civilization collapses, is in bitcoin.
Across the North American countryside, preppers like McElroy are storing more and more of their wealth in invisible wallets in cyberspace instead of stockpiling gold bars and coins in their bunkers and basement safes.
They won’t be able to access their virtual cash the moment a catastrophe knocks out the power grid or the web, but that hasn’t dissuaded them. Even staunch survivalists are convinced bitcoin will endure economic collapse, global pandemic, climate change catastrophes and nuclear war.
“I consider bitcoin to be a currency on the same level as gold,” McElroy, who lives on the farm with her husband, said by email. “It allows individuals to become self-bankers. When I fully understood the concepts and their significance, bitcoin became a fascination.”
At first glance, it seems counter-intuitive that some of bitcoin’s most ardent proponents are people motivated by the belief that public infrastructure will collapse in times of social and political distress. Bitcoin isn’t yet widely accepted as a method of payment and steep transaction costs make it inconvenient to use at vendors that do take it.
Preppers, as it happens, have a different perspective on what they see as the money of the future, which has surged 10-fold in the past 12 months as supporters lauded it as a digital alternative to rival the dollar, euro or yen.
Used to send and receive payments online, bitcoin is similar to payment networks like PayPal or Mastercard, the difference being that it runs on a decentralized network—blockchain—that’s beyond the control of central banks and regulators. It was born out of an anti-establishment vision of a government-free society, a key attraction for those seeking unhindered access to their capital in case a massive shock shuts down the banking system.
“People see bitcoin prices going to the moon. No one thinks gold is going to the moon”
“Not too long ago, people in the prepper community were actively warning against crypto, and now they’re all investing in it,” said Tom Martin, a truck driver from Washington who runs a social-media website for people interested in learning skills to survive disaster. “As long as the grid stays up, people will keep using bitcoin.”In addition to gold, silver and stocks, Martin invests in bitcoin and peers litecoin and steem because they’re easier to travel with, harder to steal and offer better protection in the event of the kind of societal breakdown that would unfold if a fiat currency like the dollar collapsed.
He’s among those confident that bitcoin can withstand even a complete blackout through the strength of the underlying blockchain, the anonymous public bookkeeping technology that records every single bitcoin transaction.
Discussions on the pros and cons of investing in crypto have popped up on survivalist forums like mysurvivalforum.com and survivalistboards.com this year as bitcoin rallied above $7,000. “Buy bitcoin” is now a more popular search phrase than “buy gold” on Google.
The buzz is starting to impinge on gold’s role as a store of value especially since, like the precious metal, there’s a finite supply of bitcoin, which proponents say gives it anti-inflationary qualities. Sales of gold coins from the U.S. Mint slid to a decade low in the first three quarters months of 2017.
“It’s definitely had some impact on the market,” Philip Newman, who does research on precious-metal coin sales and is one of the founders of research firm Metals Focus, said by phone from Washington. “People see bitcoin prices going to the moon. No one thinks gold is going to the moon.”
To attract investors who traditionally buy gold, several digital assets, like Royal Mint Gold and Anthem Gold, have been developed that are backed by physical gold stored in vaults.
Still, it’s hard to envision people walking around spending digital coins to buy Spam, canned beans or bottled water at a local supermarket when they don’t have electricity at home to charge their smart phones, let alone a working internet connection to access their digital wallets.
“I doubt bitcoin is a safe haven from an extreme-risk environment. In that sense, bitcoin isn’t gold,” said Charlie Morris, the London-based chief investment officer at Newscape Capital Advisors Ltd., which invests in cryptocurrencies and is building a price-discovery platform for them.
Bitcoin has also not reached the critical mass to be considered a viable currency to invest in, UBS Group AG’s Mark Haefele said in an interview. The total sum of all cryptocurrencies is “not even the size of some of the smaller currencies’’ that UBS would allocate to, he said.
Continue reading entire article from source: Doomsday Preppers Are Starting to Switch From Gold to Bitcoin
— With assistance by Dave Liedtka, and Samuel Dodge
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