A fascinating talk took place between two famous traders, Willy Woo and Kashyap Sriram, about how valuable and decentralized Bitcoin is compared to gold.
Many people debated whether Bitcoin’s concept originated from gold and what would happen if the cryptocurrency’s mining network stopped working. Kashyap Sriram initiated the debate by stating that Satoshi Nakamoto, the fictitious name of the person who created BTC, based the digital currency on gold.
Sriram said that Satoshi used the word “mining” to describe the process of making new BTC blocks, which he said was like getting gold out of the ground.
Bitcoin Value Vulnerability
Sriram did point out a very important difference between the two, though: gold’s value doesn’t change if no one mines it, but bitcoin’s worth would go down to zero if its mining network stopped working.
Sriram explained his decision by saying that Bitcoin owners would be left with transaction outputs that had not been spent on a blockchain that was no longer working. This would make their assets useless. He also talked about how the BTC mining network is centralized, with 11 mining pools controlling most of it. This makes it simple to shut down.
Sriram says that Bitcoin is very dependent on a centralized and capital-intensive mining industry, while gold, in his opinion, is less controlled and depends less on its mining sector. The seller then said that the idea that Bitcoin is decentralized was false and called it a “myth.”
He said that Bitcoin’s $1.2 trillion market capitalization is based on a mining network worth only $25 billion, which is a lot less than the value of the networks used by major gold mine companies like Newmont Corporation.
Sriram said that this makes the BTC network “very weak and vulnerable to a small group of big players.” He concluded that gold’s success was due to its perceived stability and lack of control by a small group of individuals. Willy Woo, a famous BTC expert, had a different opinion about what Sriram said.
Woo thought the idea that BTC miners could suddenly stop working was “amazing.” He said, in a funny way, that if that happened, he would start mining himself to get bitcoins. In his answer, Woo seemed to show that he believed BTC could survive tough times.
