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posted by Dopefish on Tuesday February 25 2014, @06:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the that-didn't-end-well dept.
lennier writes "Has Magic the Gathering Online Exchange tapped all its mana? MtGox, the first and best known Bitcoin exchange, has abruptly shut down, and CEO Mark Karpeles has resigned from the Bitcoin Foundation after rumors of ongoing theft related to the transaction malleability issue reported several weeks ago. According to the latest news reports, Bitcoin has hit a three-month low of $465 USD per coin."
 
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  • (Score: 1) by Grishnakh on Wednesday February 26 2014, @02:40PM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Wednesday February 26 2014, @02:40PM (#7297)

    That attitude is exactly why gold is expensive now: because it's shiny and pretty, rather than for its metallurgical properties. If everyone wants to make their dinner plates out of gold, then that drives up the prices, leading to it being ultra-expensive just like now. So this doesn't make sense in the context of this discussion, which is: what would it be like if no one cared about gold's shininess, and only cared about its metallurgical properties?

  • (Score: 1) by adolf on Thursday February 27 2014, @07:35AM

    by adolf (1961) on Thursday February 27 2014, @07:35AM (#7840)

    You're only considering demand, but the price of a commodity such as gold is also based on supply.

    If supply were to increase such that there were plenty of gold to go around (just as there is currently plenty of iron or aluminum), people could still have their shiny and pretty things, and I can have gold dinner plates.

    But to answer your own hypothetical question: If people, tomorrow, began to universally consider gold ugly, and there were no investments in it (no hoarding of a relatively scarce, but useful commodity? yeah, right), the price would drop...some.

    It's expensive to find gold, and it will remain expensive to find gold. If it became unprofitable to mine, people would stop mining it. This would increases scarcity, which I think would support a rather higher market price than might seem obvious at first.

    --
    I'm wasting my days as I've wasted my nights and I've wasted my youth
    • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday February 27 2014, @03:11PM

      by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday February 27 2014, @03:11PM (#7988)

      Why would anyone hoard gold if everyone thought it was ugly? Just because it's rare? Uranium is rare too, but no one hoards that as in "investment". There's dozens of other elements that are rather rare, but no one bothers hoarding those as "investments".

      If everyone thought it was ugly all of a sudden, the price would drop massively. It'd only be valuable for its industrial uses, based on its physical properties, and that's it. Lead isn't particularly attractive (quite dull actually), so it's only used for things where its properties make it attractive (and with the health problems, we've found alternatives for some of those). Of course lead is also not rare, but it also has a lot more uses than gold, even now in this age of RoHS: battery acid, solder for more critical applications (resists tin whisker growth), I'm sure there's lots more. Gold would probably still be a little more valuable just because of its rarity, but not much, due to its lack of useful applications (the gold-plated dinner plate from before would be out; people don't want ugly plates). It doesn't take much gold mass to plate connector contacts.