A lot of the nonsense brought up by the #dropgold marketing campaign for Bitcoin, such as the claim that gold has no utility, is so clearly false, it’s tempting to just ignore it. To the degree that the gold industry and investors respond in public, the campaign achieves its goal: publicity. The silent treatment would serve its perpetrators right.
But there’s a problem with ignoring falsehood. Roy Sebag eloquently sums this up in his thorough rebuttal of the #dropgold campaign:
“I abhor the phenomenon of bad information spreading its way into public markets, and feel a responsibility to rectify the public record when I identify a didactic void.”
Good for Roy.
As for the typical Millennial or younger person who might be persuaded without much thought, well, they don’t have much gold to drop. I do not see this impacting the price of gold at all.
Why bother with the campaign then? To rile up the gold community, of course. That enlists their unwilling help in promoting Bitcoin. “Any press is good press.”
Is there no hope, then—will Millennials put an end to gold’s more than 4,000 years of service as money?
Absolutely not.
From Keynes’ dismissal of gold as a “barbarous relic” to Warren Buffett’s myopic assertion that gold is useless, we’ve seen smear campaigns before. None has made any material difference.
The truth is that gold does have many uses. This includes, as others have pointed out, its use in the electronics used to mine Bitcoin.
At the end of the day, reality matters, and the fact is that gold is valuable.
KEFI Minerals plc (LON:KEFI) is focused primarily on the advanced Tulu Kapi Gold Project development project in Ethiopia, along with its pipeline of other projects within the highly prospective Arabian-Nubian Shield.
