Silver and Bitcoin - a game of scarcity
We all tend to think that Bitcoin is an investment tool for trading back to fiat currency when the price explodes. This is obviously the wrong way to think about Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the fiat, is the currency, use it as money. Bitcoin is digital gold, er perhaps silver (and maybe Ethereum is digital gold).
As we all know, Bitcoin has a set number of coins that will ever be put into the marketplace - 21,000,000. We are currently sitting slightly above 17,500,000 (1) at the time of this writing. Ethereum has yet to implement a cap in their coin structure and currently have over 104,000,000 coins circulating and counting. Also, Bitcoin are destroyed and lost accidentally everyday, slightly reducing its availability as well. So one commodity with increasing supply, at the moment, and one with a set supply that gets slightly reduced by human error.
For thousands of years humans have used gold and silver as real money for trading. They both have their place, gold for a store of value and silver as an industrial metal used in all sorts of applications such as cars and solar panels. Over the past several decades and hundreds of years, humans have kept gold stored away in vaults never to be seen. There is an immense amount of gold stored away across the globe, about 166,500 tonnes. (2) Silver, on the other hand, has been used and abused as an industrial metal. The natural ratio of gold to silver in the Earth's crust is about 1:17, (3) meaning there should be 17x more silver that we have mined than gold. Also, silver is a byproduct of refining other metals - so we should have a lot, right?
Taking into consideration the similarities between gold and silver & Bitcoin and Ethereum, it is easy to understand why a position in Bitcoin and silver may be profitable in the future. I do believe in Ethereum's smart contracts and I believe it will do well in the future too - I hodl a small bit. I also believe in gold as a store of value, even though governments have stored thousands of tonnes of it away. However, in a perfect storm of fiat currency devaluation through trade wars, $1 Trillion being added to the debt just to cover the interest, (4) and base currency increasing like a hockey stick, (5) I believe Bitcoin and silver will shine the brightest.
With diminishing supply, especially on a rare commodity like Bitcoin and silver, comes great rewards.
Please donate any amount of Satoshis/Bitcoin you can: 15zULAeUdBrz2AzZ1ZFPqt8GfS2XnyTvXk
Ethereum: 0x35dCf0b1999c7aDd468D3C13C09654408e8fF82b
(Have just lost my job, doing this to fill my time, hope you liked it!)
(1) https://coinmarketcap.com/
(2) http://demonocracy.info/infographics/world/gold/gold.html
(3) https://investinganswers.com/financial-dictionary/commodities-precious-metals/gold-silver-ratio-3519
(4) https://www.bloombergquint.com/politics/another-year-another-1-trillion-in-new-debt-for-u-s-to-raise#gs.P4rzizvx
(5) https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/041415/when-federal-reserve-bank-engaged-quantitative-easing-did-it-add-m1.asp