Bitcoin vs Gold
In the news the mainstream media has finally figured out what Bitcoin really is. Bitcoin is digital gold. It took the professionals and established experts over 10 years to figure out that Bitcoin is not going away and has lasting value.
Yet some still have the audacity to say millennials are "ignorant" for choosing digital gold over physical gold. The older generations prefer to keep their wealth in a tangible (easy to steal) form. In fact, if you'd like to see a specific article where someone from the older generation is mocking millennials have a look at ‘Ignorant Millennials’ Think Bitcoin (BTC) Can Challenge Gold, Says CEO of US Global Investors..
To refute the arguments in that article that Bitcoin cannot challenge gold I will make the case that the reason Bitcoin is worth more than gold is because it's intangible. Ask anyone who has a ton of gold where exactly their gold is being stored? In a bank or safety deposit box somewhere? So these people essentially are trusting their wealth to the same exact banks that most people who buy gold are concerned about? It seems to me contradictory why someone would trust banks (and the government) to secure their gold in the case of a collapse.
Executive Order 6102
The US government in particular has the ability by law to confiscate gold. Gold is also one of the easiest forms of wealth to confiscate and one of the most expensive to secure. So instead of the awesome security of multisignature decentralized wallets you instead have to rely on a bank vault and hope that the President whomever it is at the time will not decide to simply begin confiscating gold.
Bitcoin I expect will be worth trillions precisely because it serves a specific useful function which gold currently cannot serve as well. Gold is worth trillions and I think Bitcoin will be worth trillions as well in the next 5 or 10 years.
Executive Order 6102 is a United States presidential executive order signed on April 5, 1933, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt "forbidding the Hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the continental United States". The order was made under the authority of the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, as amended by the Emergency Banking Act the previous month.
So we have proof here that if it's tangible it can and may be confiscated. If it becomes necessary the government can and will confiscate the guns, the gold, and at that point Bitcoin will be one of the only wealth preservation tools left. This isn't to say that Bitcoin cannot be banned or blocked or restricted, but it is to say that it is much more expensive for the government to do so. The governments of the world would have to pass new laws and executive orders specifically targeting cryptocurrency hoarders and would have to pass crypto control laws.
Fake gold
Unlike with crypto you have a big problem with fake gold. You can buy gold and you have to be really careful about whether the quality is as good as you think it is. Gold in my opinion can also be a mechanism to back crypto (including Bitcoin) in the manner that Digix is doing in. This is to say you can have gold backed Bitcoins if necessary. You can have Bitcoins which also are backed by stocks, gold, silver, diamonds or anything else.
This is all possible because Bitcoin has layers and can even be forked. Why do we need gold? For industrial purposes.