Longtime Bitcoin bull Max Keiser says that gold has one single advantage over the world’s leading crypto asset by market cap.
In a new interview with Daniela Cambone of Stansberry Research, the Wall Street veteran concedes that, despite being a vocal Bitcoin advocate, gold is superior to Bitcoin in that it is a malleable good that retains its properties while also shapeshifting and providing anonymity to its holder.
“The one attribute that gold has that Bitcoin doesn’t at the moment is fungibility. Gold is fungible to an extent that Bitcoin is not. Fungibility meaning you can melt down your gold and recast it in some other different form and it maintains its integrity as gold and it’s completely anonymous. It’s completely fungible. Bitcoin, because it is digital, because it is a public blockchain, because it’s transparent, you don’t have the same fungibility.”
By traditional economics definitions, Bitcoin is not 100% fungible because of how the blockchain allows you to see the history of each coin, unlike gold, which can take an entirely new form after being melted down. According to Keiser, the lack of confidentiality on the Bitcoin blockchain is likely the reason why criminal activity using BTC has drastically decreased, with most criminals preferring cash or other assets.
“That’s in fact why criminal use of Bitcoin has gone own. It’s been estimated recently that [in] criminal cases around the world, 1% or 1.5% use Bitcoin, and that number in the last 5-9 months has gone down to under 1%. Because actually, using Bitcoin for crime is a terrible idea because you can go to the publicly accessible blockchain. It’s completely transparent and they track down the criminals, so the criminals are not using Bitcoin. They’re using cash, or they might be using gold. It’s much more fungible.”
Ex-Central Intelligence Agency director Michael Morell recently published a letter suggesting that criminal activity is in fact flowing away from the Bitcoin blockchain and into Anonymity-Enhanced Cryptocurrencies such as Monero (XMR).
“Based on our research, I have come to believe that if there was one financial ecosystem for bad actors to use that would maximize law enforcement’s chances of identifying them and their illicit activities, it would be blockchain.”
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