April 19, 2026

Capitalizations Index – B ∞/21M

Bitcoin on Track to Replace Gold as Dominant Store of Value: Crypto VC

Bitcoin on track to replace gold as dominant store of value: crypto vc

Bitcoin on Track to Replace Gold as Dominant Store of Value: Crypto VC


Bitcoin gold bar crypto cryptocurrency

Venture capitalist Lou Kerner says bitcoin is well on its way to replacing gold as the dominant store of value, noting that its market cap has already surpassed that of silver.

“What [bitcoin] has evolved into is a store of value,” Kerner told Bloomberg. “Today, the main store of value is gold. It’s an $8 trillion [market]. bitcoin today is around $60 billion, so it has an opportunity to actually replace gold as the dominant store of value.”

Kerner doubled-down on his remarks from August 2018, when he predicted that BTC would supplant gold as the most trusted store of value.

Crypto Will be ‘Bigger Than the Internet’

Kerner, the founding partner of New York-based CryptoOracle, said despite the current bear market, crypto would be a far more disruptive technology than the Internet.

“The disruption from that is gonna be bigger than the disruption that we saw from the Internet,” Kerner predicted. “bitcoin is kind of the early leader, like the Yahoo of its day. And while it’s a massive thing, it’s not the thing [right now].”

But in 20 years, BTC and crypto will be off-the-charts, Kerner claimed.

“We really believe that in 20 years, bitcoin will have created trillions of dollars in value similar to how the Internet has,” he said. “We’re at the very beginning today.”

When asked why the bitcoin price has plunged from its record high of $19,500 last December, Kerner said it’s because the market got ahead of itself due to unchecked capitalism.

Kerner said virtual currencies and blockchain would eventually prove that they are far more revolutionary than first imagined.

“There’s something called Amara’s Law, which is that the impact of all great technological changes is overestimated in the short run, but underestimated in the long run,” he said.

Basically, Kerner is saying that the true impact of crypto and bitcoin won’t be known until 20 years into the future.

[Author’s note: Amara’s Law, named for futurist Roy Amara, states that we tend to overestimate the effect of a new technology in the short run and underestimate its effect in the long run.]

Lou Kerner: The Dollar ‘is a Ponzi Scheme’

Lou kerner says bitcoin will replace gold as store of value
Lou kerner: the dollar is a ponzi scheme and gold has passed its prime. | source: shutterstock

When asked to elaborate on his stance that bitcoin would replace gold as a store of value, Kerner said gold has had a good run, but it’s time to step aside.

“Gold has had a 5,000-year run,” Kerner explained. “If you look at the history of currencies over time, 100% of them — until 400 years ago — went to zero. And the truth is, if you think about the dollar, it’s a Ponzi scheme. And that’s fine, because this is how governments work.”

He continued:

Nobody thinks we’re ever going to pay back the debt that we have. We’re never gonna pay back $20 trillion-plus dollars of debt.

The only way you’re going to maintain your purchasing power —  the only thing that has held up over time has been gold. That’s how you store your value. Over time, all currencies degrade. And eventually, they all go to zero.

So $8 trillion is stored in gold. Silver is the second-biggest store of value, at $50 billion. bitcoin is at $60 billion, so it’s really kind of taken over second place from silver as a store of value.

Skeptics: bitcoin is Not a Store of Value

Meanwhile, skeptics like financial analyst Gary Shilling say bitcoin is “a grand Ponzi scheme,” and that’s why his investment firm is shorting it.

Shilling said bitcoin fails as a currency because it lacks three fundamental requirements of a legitimate currency:

  1. It’s not a store of value.
  2. It’s not a medium of exchange.
  3. It’s not universally accepted.

“A currency has to have a store of value,” Shilling explained. “With the volatility in bitcoin prices, I don’t think it has a store of value.”

In contrast, tech billionaires like Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, and tech venture capitalist Tim Draper are confident that bitcoin will ultimately displace all other currencies.

Bitcoin bulls jack dorsey tim draper peter thiel
Billionaires Jack Dorsey, Tim Draper, and Peter Thiel are bitcoin bulls. (YouTube screenshots)

As CCN reported, Dorsey — the CEO of Square — said he believes bitcoin could become the world’s leading currency within the next decade.

“The world ultimately will have a single currency, the Internet will have a single currency,” Dorsey said. “I personally believe that it will be bitcoin.”

Featured Image from Shutterstock

Get Exclusive Crypto Analysis by Professional Traders and Investors on Hacked.com. Sign up now and get the first month for free. Click here.

Advertisement

Published at Mon, 31 Dec 2018 23:37:58 +0000

Previous Article

Bitcoin’s Institutionalization: Dates to Watch in 2019

Next Article

How To Develop a Successful Cryptocurrency & Bitcoin Tech Startup Business Today! – Guangzhou – Financial – Fintech – Entrepreneur – Workshop – Hackathon – Bootcamp – Virtual Class – Seminar – Training – Lecture – Webinar – Conference – Course

You might be interested in …

The Ethereum Killer Is Ethereum 2.0: Vitalik Buterin’s Roadmap

VitalikTalk.jpg

Speaking on November 25 at BeyondBlock Taipei 2017, Ethereum inventor and co-founder Vitalik Buterin outlined his vision for Ethereum 2.0. He described major changes in Ethereum’s architecture that are likely to be implemented over the next few years to improve Ethereum in terms of privacy, safety (consensus safety and smart contract safety) and, of course, scalability, which was the main focus of Buterin’s talk.

Buterin doesn’t seem worried about competitors. “The Ethereum killer is Ethereum, the Ethereum of China is Ethereum, the Ethereum of Taiwan is Ethereum… 2.0,” he said.

The fact that Ethereum is booming seems to confirm Buterin’s optimism. ETH’s price has been relentlessly climbing, recently reaching almost $500, and Ethereum is handling more transactions than all other major blockchains combined.

Decentralization, scalability and security are among the important properties that blockchain systems should have, but there are conflicts. Off-chain solutions are useful, but limited. According to Buterin, it’s very easy to have two of these properties but very hard to have all three. However, Ethereum’s ambitious goal should be that of achieving all three at the same time. “We want to scale to thousands of transactions per second, on chain, without any supernodes,” reads one of Buterin’s slides.

Sharding

Sharding — dividing a blockchain network into several smaller component networks (called shards) capable of processing transactions in parallel — is considered to be a promising way to achieve high throughputs comparable to the thousands of transactions per second of traditional payment networks such as Visa and MasterCard.

“You can think of [sharding] as, in a fairly simple version, creating a blockchain where you have, let’s say, a hundred different universes, and each of these universes is a different account space,” said Buterin. “So you can have an account in some universe or you can have a contract in some universe and you can send a transaction in some universe, and if you send a transaction in some universe it only affects stuff in some universe.

“But these kind of 100 universes are not just separate blockchains; they are systems that are also interconnected with each other,” continued Buterin. “Particularly, they share consensus. So in order to break even one of them, you have to break the whole thing.”

Buterin went on to describe relatively easy and more sophisticated ways to implement sharding in the Ethereum blockchain, outlining a sharding roadmap that foresees, at least initially, the creation of new “universes” that don’t impact the main chain while permitting iterative experimentation, such as introducing higher levels of scalability, starting with “quadratic scalability as nodes validate certain shards and act as light clients for other shards.”

Privacy

Buterin noted that zero-knowledge proof (zk-Snarks) privacy technology equivalent to Zcash has been implemented in the recent “Byzantium” Ethereum upgrade, offering application developers new ways to implement tighter privacy. These new privacy tools will permit showing transactions to specific parties while hiding them from public view. Buterin went as far as saying that the privacy problem is now three quarters of the way to being solved.

Proof of Work vs. Proof of Stake

A major upgrade to Ethereum will be the introduction of Proof of Stake (PoS) in Casper which, according to Buterin, might be ready by next summer. With the first release of Casper, Ethereum will transition from pure Proof of Work (PoW) to hybrid PoW/PoS. “In this scheme, all of the proof-of-work mechanics will continue to exist, but additional proof-of-stake mechanics will be added,” noted Buterin.

The main reason why PoS is seen as a necessary development is, of course, the need to reduce the energy requirements of PoW blockchains like the current versions of Ethereum and bitcoin. A recent report claims that bitcoin mining consumes as much power in a year as 159 countries, which is clearly far too much, and Buterin admitted that today’s Ethereum isn’t any better than bitcoin in that respect.

Smart Contract Security

Smart contracts implemented with Turing-complete programming languages are arguably the main innovation introduced by Ethereum. While smart contracts are finding countless applications and moving lots of money, the security and safety of Ethereum smart contracts have been questioned. Buterin confirmed that Ethereum will eventually introduce formal verification for smart contracts and that a new Python-like smart-contract programming language — dubbed “Viper” — is being implemented to enable the development of safer Ethereum applications.

While Buterin hasn’t said anything that he has not said in previous talks and papers, his BeyondBlock talk served as a useful confirmation and summary of the ambitious Ethereum development roadmap.

Besides Buterin’s talk, all the talks given at BeyondBlock Taipei 2017 are included in the full video recordings of the morning session and the afternoon session.

The post The Ethereum Killer Is Ethereum 2.0: Vitalik Buterin’s Roadmap appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

Bitcoin_nocashday-100

bitcoin_nocashday-100

bitcoin_nocashday-100By CashlessWay – Global Hub for ePayment Culture on 2014-06-28 09:38:52[wpr5_ebay kw=”bitcoin” num=”1″ ebcat=”” cid=”5338043562″ lang=”en-US” country=”0″ sort=”bestmatch”]

Central bank of iran bans banks from crypto dealings

Central Bank Of Iran Bans Banks From Crypto Dealings

Central Bank Of Iran Bans Banks From Crypto Dealings The central bank of Iran has banned domestic banks and other financial institutions from dealing in cryptocurrencies, citing money-laundering concerns first raised in a circular from […]