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from the the-times-they-are-a'-changin' dept.
Overstock.com and the Internet Archive have separately discussed their decisions to hold onto cryptocurrencies rather than convert them immediately. From news.bitcoin.com:
Operating as a 501(c)(3) non-profit, the Internet Archive has accepted bitcoin donations since 2012. This week Kahle decided to explain to the public in a blog post why bitcoin remains a fixture in the nonprofit's balance sheet.
"A foundation was curious as to why we have Bitcoin on our balance sheet, and I thought I would explain it publicly," explains Kahle. "The Internet Archive explores how bitcoin and other Internet innovations can be useful in the non-profit sphere – this is part of it. We want to see how donated bitcoin can be used, not just sold off."
[...] At the beginning of August the company's CEO, Patrick Byrne revealed it is currently stashing fifty percent of its bitcoin revenue. Byrne has been [a] long-time bitcoin proponent and believes the technology behind the decentralized currency will be the future of finance. During a budget report, Byrne revealed the business used to keep 10 percent of the daily bitcoin revenue the company earned and converted the rest of the funds to USD. Now Byrne details that the corporation's board of directors has authorized a strategy to hold fifty percent of the firm's bitcoin revenue.
The original announcements:
http://blog.archive.org/2017/09/02/why-bitcoin-is-on-the-internet-archives-balance-sheet/
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/edited-transcript-ostk-earnings-conference-155549361.html (requires ECMAScript to "Read More")
Note: "HODL" appears to be a bitcoin joke, see here
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 08 2017, @03:35PM
You are thinking of survival on the wrong timescale. Gold and other precious metals are mostly useless in the immediate timeframe after somme sort of collapse or disaster, but they are hedge in the intermediate scale. The ifs whats and hows are going to be wildly different based on what sort of scenario you are imagining, but almost all scenarios are going to be localized in some fashion. If the USD collapsed, someone holding gold bullion could still do trade with the Europeans or Asia. Also, metals are portable and divisible. How much does two thousand dollars of canned food or cigarettes weigh? For the last 10 or so years, that is less than two ounces of gold. Ever try to split off five dollars of a battery? Doesn't work too well. Again, not particularly usefull to have if you are starving after a flood, but if you have a stash somewhere, you may be much better off after things settle down.
Anyway, the article is about Bitcoin and neither organization seems to be concered with the dollar collapsing, more of holding Bitcoin as another investment device like stocks or securities. The Archive.org guys seem to be mostly technophiles, so the bitcoins were actually used to pay a number of salaries and ended up making them some money.