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May 17, 2020 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
42:18
STORE OF VALUE: Bitcoin vs. gold vs. dollars
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I hear a lot of people talking about how Bitcoin is a store of value.
And since it's my job to help people think critically about the world around them, and I don't want my listeners and readers to be hoodwinked by bad logic, I thought I would address this issue rationally.
Let's look at what is the definition of a store of value.
It means that something preserves value without losing it, but it also implies that this preservation extends through a period of time, some long period of time, you would assume, long relative to, I don't know, human lifetime, perhaps.
And if you look at things that store value, let's say gold, you know, Bitcoin is often called digital gold.
Well, how long has gold been around?
Well, gold is an element of the cosmos.
And so, well, according to mainstream scientists, the cosmos, the Big Bang started, what do they say, 13, 14 billion years ago?
But of course, gold...
Didn't exist right away.
There was just the lighter elements, hydrogen and then helium.
And I guess after some clouds condensed and there was more nuclear fusion and so on, you would get slightly heavier elements such as lithium.
And after that, maybe eventually you'd get carbon and oxygen and nitrogen.
And then after some period of time, you might get lighter metals like aluminum and then so on and so forth.
Eventually, you end up with things like calcium and magnesium and then eventually gold and copper and silver and zinc and things like that, kind of the middle of the road elements.
Not the heavier stuff like lead and uranium and so on, but sort of middle of the road.
It takes time.
So let's say, I don't know the exact year, obviously, in the cosmos that gold was formed for the first time, but we can pretty confidently say it was billions of years ago.
How about that?
Let's just take a guess that it's 10 billion years old.
So gold has been around, we'll say, 10 billion years.
Maybe the correct answer is only 5 billion.
I'm not exactly sure, but it's billions.
Now, how long has Bitcoin been around?
Let's see.
It was created in 2008, I believe.
So that makes it about 12 years old.
So let's see.
If we're going to compare Bitcoin to gold as a store of value, you're comparing 12 years to perhaps 12 billion years, which means if that's the right age of gold, then that means gold is...
A billion times better store of value than Bitcoin.
Thus, Bitcoin being called digital gold is absurd.
And the second thing is gold is physical and real as are we.
Our bodies are physical and real.
We can touch gold and we can live on a piece of land because we are ambulatory.
We have legs.
We can walk around a piece of land.
And by the way, how long has land Land is a good store of value.
People buy farmland in addition to gold and silver and, let's say, other precious elements.
So what about land?
How long has land been around?
Well, the Earth was created, according to mainstream science again, what, four-plus billion years ago?
Now, you probably wouldn't want to live on it back then when it first got started because it was...
You talk about climate change.
You should try the first billion years of planet Earth Basically, volcanoes and earthquakes and, you know, insane conditions going off everywhere.
But nevertheless, land has existed for billions of years.
And the land that you are on right now has existed for certainly hundreds of millions of years.
I mean, obviously, we could talk about plate tectonics and how the earth recycles land.
And there are subduction zones where current land slips underneath other pieces of land.
And it's all kind of recycled over time.
The land that you're standing on right now is, no doubt, hundreds of millions of years old.
How old is Bitcoin?
12 years old.
So store of value, no comparison between land and Bitcoin, or gold and Bitcoin, for that matter.
Now, what about the dollar?
Is the dollar a good store of value?
No.
Well, one of the definitions of something that stores value is that it would not lose value over time.
Well, what about the dollar?
So since the Federal Reserve, and what, the creature from Jekyll Island in 1913, the dollar has lost, what is it, 99% or 98%?
Of its value?
Something like that.
It's lost almost all its value.
So over a little more than a century, you could say the dollar has lost most of its value.
So if someone were to ask you, is the dollar a good store of value?
The answer, at least in a human lifetime duration perspective, the answer would have to be no.
Doesn't seem like it is at all.
Most of your purchasing power has disappeared.
And now with the trillions being printed by the Fed...
And being spent by the Treasury for this pandemic bailout, you know, trillion dollars here, trillion dollars there.
Oh, it's Tuesday, another trillion dollars.
It's clear that the dollar itself is going to collapse in terms of value, which means eventually here, probably pretty soon, the long-term store of value of the dollar will be zero.
People will be left holding dollars and wondering what to do with them.
Maybe they can...
Maybe they can add to their toilet paper stockpiles that they were shopping for when the pandemic first broke out.
So the dollar is not a good store of value, that's for sure.
But what about Bitcoin?
Could Bitcoin do better than the dollar?
They say that Bitcoin has a limited supply.
Built-in scarcity.
Now, this is the argument of a lot of people who say that Bitcoin has intrinsic value or is a good store of value, even though it's only 12 years old.
I mean, would you trust a 12 year old with all your money?
By the way, I wouldn't.
I wouldn't trust a 15 year old, a 19 year old.
I mean, would you turn over all your money to a 12 year old and say, yeah.
Yeah, hold on to that for me.
I'll ask for it back one day, because that's what Bitcoin is.
It's like a 12-year-old.
It's like an adolescent in terms of storing value.
But people say scarcity gives it value.
This is one of the current arguments around Bitcoin, that scarcity gives it value in the current situation.
Well, the recent Bitcoin halving reduces the amount of Bitcoins that are rewarded for mining, right?
And so this will limit the supply, and it's supposed to be hard limited to, what, 21 million coins or something in that realm.
So is that a real limit?
Does it have real scarcity like gold, for example?
Gold is hard to dig up out of the ground.
It's hard to refine.
It's hard to mine.
Gold has scarcity because there's a finite amount on this planet and it's very difficult to get, mostly because it's only available in tiny little flecks in tons and tons of dirt and soil that you have to sift through mechanically, typically, in order to get gold.
So gold has a certain amount of scarcity and a certain amount of work required to get it.
Well, Bitcoin, does it really have scarcity?
Not if it's based on software.
The scarcity is based on software code.
So the code can be altered.
The code can be altered to lift the limit.
So there's no actual scarcity.
There's only artificial scarcity.
In other words, do you remember Cabbage Patch dolls back in the 1980s?
This is the way the doll makers would try to create some kind of frenzy before Christmas.
They would hire some people to go into a shopping center, like a mall, and they would fight over Cabbage Patch dolls, and then they would say, oh my god, the parents are going crazy over Cabbage Patch dolls, and they're nowhere to be found!
And the news would cover it, you know, probably getting paid off by the doll makers.
And then there would be artificial scarcity, or the doll maker would hold back doll shipments to some of the retail stores.
So that sure enough, some of the shelves are empty, the Cabbage Patch dolls are disappearing.
And that created this desire among people to have Cabbage Patch dolls, because they thought that other people wanted them.
And if other people want them, then I should want them.
This is the logic.
This is how it goes.
There's a well-known psychological principle of accelerating scarcity, creating internal demand for something.
Robert Cialdini actually talked about this in his outstanding book.
I think it's called Influence.
And there have been quite a number of psychological studies on this.
And they did experiments with a cookie jar.
And they would have a child come in.
And if the cookie jar was full of cookies, they would ask the child, do you want a cookie?
A certain percentage would say yes, and a certain percentage would say no.
Let's just say that's 50-50.
But if there were only three cookies in the cookie jar, and then the child comes in, and then the adult in the room is asking the question, hey, do you want a cookie?
And then the adult reaches in and takes a cookie, leaving only two cookies, and then another person comes into the room, And takes a cookie, leaving only one cookie.
In almost every case, the child wants the cookie.
It's the same cookie as before.
It's just that the child perceives increasing scarcity.
And that creates artificial demand because of the artificial scarcity.
So, the human mind can be easily manipulated by doll makers or...
Cryptocurrency creators or marketers of lots of things to create artificial scarcity.
And the human mind is hardwired to want something that is being observed to demonstrate a decreasing supply and increasing demand by other people.
It's kind of a social checksum that's going on where the child thinks, well, if other people want it, they must have a reason to want it.
Therefore, I must want it because obviously they have a reason, even though I don't know the reason yet.
Maybe these cookies are incredibly amazing, but the child will want the cookie.
So am I comparing cookies in a cookie jar to Bitcoin?
Yes, actually I am.
Sometimes people want something because artificial scarcity has been created.
The thing is that this is artificial when it comes to Bitcoin.
The scarcity can easily be changed because it's software code.
So there is no actual physical limitation on the supply of Bitcoin.
There's only a logical limitation.
And a logical limitation can be lifted.
It can be altered.
And the way we know that is that they've already altered Bitcoin code, what, thousands of times?
And there have been forks.
You know, this group forks off from that fork and they create, you know, Bitcoin version, you know, two or three or whatever, just a hundred different Bitcoins.
You know, Bitcoin Classic and all these different versions.
Well, what are those?
Those are code alterations, which proves that the code can be altered.
You can't do that with gold.
No matter how much you try, you can't rewrite the code of the table of elements and say, let's transform lead into gold and let's just have unlimited gold supplies.
I mean, scientists have been trying to do that and alchemists for, you know, centuries trying to turn lead into gold.
No one's been able to do that.
You know how we know that that's the case?
Because there isn't a flood of gold in the world.
If someone had figured that out, Gold would be very abundant and therefore not very scarce and therefore not very valuable.
So I guess you could say there is a risk for all the people who are buying gold.
The risk is that somebody figures out how to turn lead into gold.
I guess that's a very real risk, right?
If that happens, then there's going to be just a huge supply of gold in the world and the value of the current gold is going to plummet.
But it seems like the odds of that happening are very, very slim.
Now, you could say, well, maybe a golden meteor crashes onto the planet and maybe it impacts land somewhere and it spreads gold dust.
It's just raining out of the sky, and it deposits a layer of gold all over the planet.
And then suddenly everybody's got gold.
Okay, that could happen, but the chances of that happening are so infinitesimally small that the odds of Bitcoin being altered to increase its limit, you know, coin limit, are...
It's hard to even estimate how many orders of magnitude higher.
Twelve orders of magnitude higher, perhaps?
That's just a guess, but I don't think the planet is going to get hit with a golden asteroid.
So gold scarcity is very much locked in because it depends on the laws of physics and the table of elements and atomic nuclei, for example.
Things that are hard for human beings to alter.
But on the list of things that are very easy for human beings to alter are things like software code.
So that's something to think about.
Is Bitcoin a store of value because it has scarcity?
Not really if the scarcity is artificial and can be easily altered.
It's kind of like you go to the grocery store and right now they have limits on buying, I guess, what, toilet paper and beef and pork chops and things that people buy that are in short supplies.
Pork chops, limit three per customer.
So there's artificial scarcity.
What happens when they have a limit of three pork chops?
Everybody buys three pork chops.
Well, not everybody, but I guess pork chop-eating people buy all the pork chops they can get creates increased demand because of the sudden scarcity.
But the grocery store the next day, they could say, ah, no limit, and the purchases would actually go down.
Yes, they would go down because there's no longer this scarcity.
So Bitcoin scarcity can be altered very easily.
Now let's talk about proof of work because one of the arguments of Bitcoin people is that Bitcoin has intrinsic value because it took work to create it.
That argument is such bad logic.
It is such a fallacy that it's almost laughable to hear anyone claim that.
They don't understand what intrinsic value means.
Gold has intrinsic value because it has real-world applications.
Gold can be used in dentistry.
Gold can be used in electronics.
It has industrial uses, but also...
It has uses in jewelry and things that people like and they assign value to for human reasons, culture and art and so on.
Gold has intrinsic value because of what it is.
So people say, well, Bitcoin has intrinsic value because it took work to produce it.
But the only reason it took work to produce it is because the work is artificially created.
All of these Bitcoin mining machines spinning their wheels...
You know, quadrillions of times guessing different hashes to try to find the right number to claim, you know, a Bitcoin reward, basically.
It's a bunch of artificial work that is pointless and that isn't even actually necessary.
In other words, it's like paying people money to run around in circles and every 1,000 circles they run around, you give them a dollar.
Does that mean that all the running around has intrinsic value?
No, it's just something you made them do.
In order to give them a dollar.
That's not intrinsic value.
So land has intrinsic value because we are physical beings and we need physical space.
So a human being is a certain physical size on average and we need a certain amount of living space.
We need a bed typically of a certain size.
We need a hallway of a certain size.
We need a toilet of a certain size.
We need a kitchen.
We need, you know, A place to park a car, let's say.
We need to be able to move around in the physical 3D world.
So physical space has intrinsic value because it's an extension of our existence as physical beings in a 3D world.
This is why real estate will always have some amount of intrinsic value because we are physical beings.
This is also why, for example, water always has intrinsic value because we need water.
We also need food in order to live.
And so farmland always has intrinsic value because farmland can produce food which has value to human beings.
And ranch animals and so on.
This is why soil has intrinsic value.
And if you combine these things, you have land and soil and rainwater, then you have a very valuable piece of farmland with very good intrinsic value.
Did the land have to do any work to create that intrinsic value?
No.
It just has to exist.
Because its value is inherent in who we are as physical beings and our particular needs for water and food and space.
So the land did not have to run through endless computations to prove it has value.
That would be absurd.
The land just has to exist.
In fact, when there's a volcano in Hawaii, for example, and there's new land created, that land suddenly has new value.
Or when rivers flood and change course and there's suddenly a new piece of land created on the bank of a river, for example, that land has value.
It didn't have to do work to have value.
It's something that just exists in a way that's congruent with the basic needs of human beings.
Bitcoin fills no basic need of human beings in the physical world.
Humans can live just fine without Bitcoin.
And the way we know that is because Bitcoin has only been around for 12 years.
And how long have humans been around?
Has it been longer than 12 years?
Yes.
Yes, it's been, well, according to anthropologists, hundreds of thousands of years.
So how did humans survive without Bitcoin?
You know, during the Revolutionary War, how did they survive without Bitcoin?
The answer is, no one needs Bitcoin.
Its so-called intrinsic value is entirely artificial.
And here's another way to look at this.
Some people say, well, the work that went into Bitcoin is proof that it has intrinsic value.
The work.
That gives it value.
Well, that's, again, a very faulty argument.
You may know somebody who is an artist.
You know an artist?
Any artists out there?
Most artists are failed artists.
I'm not trying to be insulting to artists.
I think it's great to pursue art.
But what I'm saying is, commercially, most art is worthless.
Despite the fact that those artists put a tremendous amount of work into it.
So if you are a crappy artist, and I'm a crappy artist in the sense that I don't know how to paint a masterpiece.
I don't know how to sketch a masterpiece.
So just use me as an example.
I'm a crappy artist.
If I spend a hundred hours creating this painting of something, and because I'm not very skilled at art, it looks like crap.
And then I say, no, this has intrinsic value because of the hours I put in it.
What is an art customer going to say to me?
They're going to say, nonsense!
There's no value in this art.
It's a piece of crap and it's worthless.
It doesn't matter how many hours you put into it, does it?
And you see, there are many things like that.
People who create, who are writers and who write a novel.
Lots of people want to be a novelist, especially they want to write fiction.
Now, what percentage of fiction novelists produce a novel that's any good?
The answer is way less than 1%.
Most people who think they can write a novel are delusional.
They don't know how to write a novel.
Mostly they write things that suck.
I'm sorry to be just kind of blunt here.
I mean, I'm a professional writer.
You know, I've written I don't know how many millions of words in my life.
I've written a top, you know, best-selling number one on Amazon.com science book called Food Forensics.
I am an accomplished writer, but I've never attempted to sell fiction.
You know why?
Because writing fiction...
It's the hardest form of writing in the world if you're trying to have it pay off.
Most people spend hours, I mean, even a thousand hours on a novel, and it sucks.
Does that mean the novel has intrinsic value?
No.
Not if it sucks.
Same thing with a chef in a kitchen.
You know, maybe some of the listeners here are good chefs, and you can take a bunch of different ingredients, and you can put in some time and effort and some heat on a stovetop.
You know, a little blender.
Some butter.
I don't know whatever you're doing in there.
Some gastronomical mystifying concoction.
And you whip up some amazing thing and you can charge $200 a plate.
Well, that's artistry.
That's great.
But most people who try to cook something end up cooking food that sucks.
Most people are not chefs.
Most people are not good fiction writers.
Most people are not novelists, right?
Most people are not good at these things that can involve a lot of time and produce very lousy results.
So it doesn't mean that the time you put into something gives it intrinsic value.
The value comes from what others agree is its value.
And that brings me to the conclusion of this.
Now, Bitcoin has value in the sense that other people have faith in its value.
So the only reason that Bitcoin is worth whatever $9,000, $10,000 a coin at the moment is because There are enough other people who agree with that illusion of wealth that they have projected value onto the system.
It's a shared illusion of wealth, by the way, which is no different than the dollar.
The dollar has no intrinsic value either, and it's only this faith in the system that keeps the dollar going.
But the dollar and Bitcoin really have a lot more in common than you might think.
They're all based on faith.
Once the faith is lost, both of them go to zero.
And Bitcoin even has the issue that, well, it's all based on a cyber illusion.
In other words, it's a projection in cyberspace that collapses when there is no electricity, a grid-down scenario, or you don't have access to a computer.
So you have to have a working internet infrastructure for Bitcoin to function.
Otherwise, its value goes to zero.
I've often asked, what's the value of Bitcoin in a grid down, you know, power collapse scenario?
And the answer is zero.
But what's the value of gold or land or silver in such a scenario?
Gold preserves its value.
Whether or not the lights are on, whether or not computers function, whether or not the internet is working.
Gold has intrinsic value, so does silver.
In fact, silver, you might argue, has even more intrinsic value in terms of its applications, real-world practical applications.
But none of these things disappear when the power goes off and the grid goes down.
And so the real issue with Bitcoin is that a black swan event, and I know not a lot of people understand what black swans really are.
I don't have time to get into all that right here, right now.
But a black swan event can just take out Bitcoin and send it to zero.
Such an event would be, for example, a solar flare.
A solar flare is wiping out the global power grid.
Which takes down the whole system of cyberspace, you know, at least theoretically.
And how often are solar flares?
Well, according to NASA, there's about a 12% chance every decade that a solar flare will strike the Earth.
Now, what's the magnitude of that solar flare?
Unknown.
There was one in the 1800s that took out all the telegraph lines and zapped a bunch of electronic components back in that day.
And of course, today, with circuits being much smaller and more susceptible to smaller amounts of current that is, of course, induced in the circuits upon exposure to electromagnetic fields from the solar flare, you know, the Carrington effect and so on.
Then it seems like a lot of the computers and circuit boards and so on that function today would be more vulnerable than the telegraph lines back in the 1800s, right?
So NASA says there's a 12% chance every decade of one of these striking Earth.
Well, 12% chance every decade?
Gosh, that means that the odds of one of these events happening in your lifetime are very, very high, actually.
Whereas you might ask yourself, what are the odds of gold happening?
All vanishing from existence in the cosmos simultaneously.
The odds of that are zero.
Or what are the odds of all land disappearing?
Zero.
What are the odds of silver vanishing?
Zero.
But what are the odds of Bitcoin vanishing?
Substantial over time.
Substantial even in the time span of a human lifetime.
So my biggest concern with Bitcoin, and this is one of the reasons why I recorded this, is not to say that it doesn't have some temporary value, because I understand that it does have temporary value as long as the illusion of faith in the system is upheld.
Then people can continue to use Bitcoin.
And what's great about it is it's outside the Federal Reserve System.
It's outside the central banks.
It cannot be controlled by governments.
And that's really the greatest thing about Bitcoin, as far as I'm concerned.
That's an awesome property, because governments are just going to bankrupt the whole world.
You know, Bitcoin, if people remain faithful to Bitcoin, it could have value for quite an extended period of time.
But that faith can also vanish or the entire infrastructure upon which Bitcoin is built might vanish.
You know, solar flare, EMP attack, nuclear war, things like that.
So a black swan type of event, which is a really an unanticipated extreme event, an outlier outside the realm of what people would normally predict.
It could take out Bitcoin completely, sending its value to zero.
Whereas the odds of some kind of black swan event, let's say flooding the planet with gold, i.e.
a golden meteor striking the planet, are many, many orders of magnitude lower.
I'm going to say 15 orders of magnitude lower.
How about that?
15.
Because I think 12 is just not enough.
15 orders of magnitude difference.
And so, does Bitcoin have value right now?
Right now, in this moment?
The answer is yes, absolutely.
Bitcoin has value.
It has a utilitarian value that could exist for some period of time.
In fact, I predicted that Bitcoin would go up during this pandemic, and that's largely what has happened.
It has a utilitarian value in terms of, let's say, being able to allow people to purchase illicit things semi-anonymously, drugs and prostitution or international weapons trades and things like that.
Bitcoin is useful for governments to pay bribes because it doesn't go through the swift banking system.
If you're going to bribe an official in Russia or the United States or China, Bitcoin's a pretty handy way to do it.
You just hand them, here's a thumb drive with your Bitcoin on it, and you don't have to create a track record of a bank transaction, let's say.
So there is value in it.
I think the CIA loves Bitcoin because they can use it to pay bribes and move money around and things like that.
I'm not saying that all the uses of Bitcoin are illegal, by the way.
There are plenty of legitimate uses of Bitcoin.
And, you know, I've used Bitcoin in the past to make legitimate purchases.
I purchased a bunch of fire starters, survival gear, with Bitcoin in the past.
I also purchased gold when I used to have Bitcoin.
I cashed it all in for gold, by the way.
And oh, I sleep so much better because no matter what happens to the price of Bitcoin, when I wake up, I still have the same amount of gold.
That's amazing.
If you want to sleep well at night, instead of stockpiling Bitcoin or stockpiling dollars or stockpiling stocks, All these young people logging into Robin Hood.
They think they're going to be millionaires.
Oh, wait till the day of reckoning comes for that generation.
They're going to discover what it means to be wiped out.
Will be fascinating.
But every day I wake up and have the same amount of gold, and that's why I tell people...
Start stacking gold and silver because you always have it.
You always have it.
But then some people say, well, someone could rob you and take your gold.
Yeah, they could rob you and take your Bitcoin wallet.
They could force you to give them your wallet password at gunpoint.
Or, dare I say, seems like half the Bitcoin hubs and transaction centers all across the internet, they've all run away with people's money, right?
Yeah.
I mean, do I need to bring up the history of Mt.
Gox and all the other things that have happened, all the Bitcoin theft that's happened?
I mean, for God's sake, my gold is far safer in my closet guarded by my AR-15 and my Glock and my night vision PVS-14 than your Bitcoin wallet is hosted by some Bitcoin exchange that's actually some big scam that's about to get raided by the FBI and shut down.
I mean, there's no argument there.
I can defend my gold.
I got a SIG rifle.
I'm actually looking at it right now.
What do I have on there?
I got a really nice red dot sight, one of those shakeawakes from Holosun.
I got a suppressor on it, and I've got it loaded with the expanding tip subsonic 5.56 rounds.
And I always label my magazines, so I got my Magpul magazines.
And it's got yellow tape, electrical tape around it.
To me, that means subsonic, and it's got the word sub on it.
So these are the nighttime shoot-the-intruder rounds.
And so far, I've never had to use them.
But I am far more confident of being able to defend my gold than any of you should be in terms of your confidence of defending your Bitcoin.
Because Bitcoin can and will be stolen or lost, whereas gold at least...
You can hide it.
You can micro-cash it.
You can bury it somewhere.
You can draw a treasure map.
You can own a firearm if it's legal.
You know, you can make people pay a steep price.
If people steal your Bitcoin, they can do so anonymously.
Some Russian hackers or something, they just take your wallet.
They never have to step into your house.
At least if someone's going to steal my gold, they've got to put their life at risk.
You know, they got to dodge bullets, basically, if they want to steal my gold.
And so that's, there's a lot fewer people willing to do that than hackers online who are trying to steal your wallet and guess your passwords.
And you can also lose your Bitcoin wallet if you're storing the wallet on your own computer.
And by the way, these wallets are getting huge in size over time because, of course, all the shared ledger transaction logs, you know, at some point it's going to be like...
Like, 20 terabytes of data for every Bitcoin user.
But if you lose your wallet, computer, and you didn't have a backup, and most people don't, then, oh, your wallet's gone forever.
I mean, how much Bitcoin has been lost forever out of the entire blockchain?
Quite a lot, you know?
But gold, even if there's a house fire, and let's say I have gold in my closet, a whole house burns down.
You know, someone who's not very well informed, I say, well, you lost your gold, it burned up in the fire.
No, it didn't.
You can't burn gold.
You know why?
Because it's an element.
You can't burn aluminum.
It's still aluminum.
I mean, sure, yeah, you can surround gold with flames.
What do you get?
Melted gold.
Melted gold.
It's still gold.
Still worth every penny because it's all there.
You didn't lose any gold by having it go through a house fire or silver or other precious metals.
I don't know why people think gold can't survive a house fire.
It survives just fine.
It's one of the few things that will be left.
Hey, look, there's a A melted ingot of precious metals.
What do you know?
Probably worth more than the house was anyway.
But the only way to really burn up gold is to have it at temperatures of the sun and things like, you know, basically nuclear fusion or fission.
Basically, you have to take gold and throw it into an exploding star.
And then it might no longer be gold after the supernova goes off.
The gold might, you know, might become smaller elements.
It might be heavier elements.
Part of your gold might fuse with some other...
Elements have become lead.
I guess you can't turn lead into gold, but you can turn gold into lead through a supernova.
But unless you own a spaceship and are planning on taking a cosmic trek to the nearest exploding star, there's really no risk that your gold is no longer going to be gold.
Every ounce of gold that you buy and save will continue to be an ounce of gold, probably for billions of years, long after you're gone.
Billions of years.
How long is our sun going to survive?
What, 400 million years before it becomes...
Larger, like a giant, like a, what's it called?
A red giant, right?
Where the amount of mass that's been converted to energy is so great that the gravity pull of the star is no longer very strong.
So the actual sun atmosphere expands probably to the orbit of Earth.
So you have a giant red star at that point, and Earth gets consumed.
Well, even then, it's probably still gold.
Until the sun explodes.
Or, I don't know, collapses into a black hole.
At which point I think the gold gets ripped apart at the atomic level by the black hole.
So I guess you could throw your gold into a black hole.
Which is the same thing as investing in treasury bills, by the way.
Because the dollar will become a giant sucking black hole of economic destruction at some point.
So really, if you ask me...
If you're going to use Bitcoin, keep the duration really, really short.
Use it to transfer money or buy something, but don't bet your long-term financial future on something that has no proven track record.
It's only 12 years old, which again, would you trust a 12 year old with all your money?
No.
Would you trust a 12 year old with the keys to your car?
Probably not.
12 year olds are not a proven track record of making good decisions.
So use it short term, but don't think that it is a store of value.
Anyone saying it's a store of value is not very educated about the history of money or value or reality.
I'm sorry to say it just so bluntly, but I don't think you want me to beat around the bush, do you?
Just say it the way it is.
There's a lot of stupid people in the world.
A lot of stupid people.
Most of them have all their life savings in dollars, which is more insane, in my view, than having a life savings in Bitcoin.
I mean, I would bet you...
And yeah, you can quote me on this.
I bet you Bitcoin's going to outlast the dollar.
I will say that.
I think the dollar will collapse before Bitcoin collapses.
How about that?
And I think there will be...
A very huge spike in Bitcoin once the hyperinflation of the dollar starts kicking in.
So those of you out there who have an appetite for speculation, and don't take my information as advice here, and I don't own any Bitcoin, and I'm not going to buy Bitcoin because I'm not interested in speculating on Bitcoin.
I buy gold.
That's what I'm sitting on because I can count on it.
But some people, if they time it just right, are going to make a fortune in Bitcoin when the hyperinflation of the dollar kicks in.
There's going to be a lot of people leaping into Bitcoin.
Bitcoin could, yes, it could theoretically at some point go to $100,000 a coin.
But then at some future date, and we don't know the date, it's going to go to zero.
See?
So instead of trying to time it, you got to time it perfectly in order to speculate and then get out when the getting out is good.
And most people, they play psychological games with themselves.
They won't sell when they need to sell because they're like, oh, it could go higher.
It's $100,000 a coin.
My friend told me it's going to go to $200,000.
I should stay in.
And then they'll ride it all the way down to zero, you see.
So I don't advise speculating in Bitcoin.
I am just acknowledging that I think Bitcoin will outlast the dollar.
And I think that gold will outlast all of them.
Gold will still be here.
When human society is long gone and the dollar is history and there are no central banks, whatever, gold will still be here.
So gold is the ultimate long-term store of value as well as land, but gold is easier to carry around than acres.
So gold is...
Right now, in my opinion, the best choice for actual stores of value, given the one caveat black swan type of event of a giant golden meteor colliding with Earth, wiping out the value of gold.
That's possible, but the odds are extremely, extremely low.
Almost zero.
In my view.
Unless you...
Maybe you have a telescope and you've spawned a giant golden meteor and you have information that I don't have.
That's possible.
But based on the information I have, I don't think...
I don't think a giant golden meteor is going to hit the planet.
Although I wouldn't put it past Elon Musk to claim that one would...
Elon Musk...
Yeah...
That's how we're gonna fund Tesla.
There's a giant golden meteor that's gonna hit Alameda County, and then we're gonna harvest that and make Tesla cars that are gold-plated.
Hey, if Elon Musk could get lithium to work, Then he might be more believable on gold.
But so far, he can't even master the lighter elements with atomic mass of seven.
So I'm not going to give it to him on gold yet.
Anyway, that's my view.
Thank you for listening.
I hope that you learned something here.
And look, you know, Don't take all my attitude too seriously.
I just try to have fun.
I try to poke fun at different theories and so on.
Actually, if you're doing great with Bitcoin, go for it.
I don't have anything against people who are Bitcoiners or what have you.
Because everybody's got to learn a lesson at some point.
And it will go to zero at some point.
And people will have a new education.
But I'm going to hold on to gold.
And I'm pretty sure that's going to last...
My lifetime and way beyond.
But thank you for listening.
Mike Adams here, the Health Ranger.
Newstarget.com and naturalnews.com.
Take care.
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