The Bitcoin or Gold psyop is silly and the debaters on both sides are usually clueless.
Why wouldn't you own both Bitcoin and Gold? They are both assets outside the system and have different advantages/disadvantages.
To mention some of gold's advantages (because everyone here already knows about Bitcoin's advantages):
(1) Physical gold has no public ledger.
- No historical chain of custody anchored in a global database.
- Evidence of holdings is fragmentary: vault records, invoices, eyewitnesses, maybe customs records.
- Outside that, the state has suspicion, not a cryptographic audit trail.
- The "omniscient ledger" simply doesn’t exist.
(2) Harder to geofence at scale from a screen.
- Once it is in your physical possession, there is no equivalent "app store ban" or "node-liability" lever that instantly makes it unusable for most people.
(3) Gold has no "core devs", no client politics, no mempool policy.
- "Protocol" = physics, metallurgy, and a scale.
- There is no equivalent of a small GitHub group with agenda-setting power.
- There is no "v30" for gold. No client upgrade that suddenly increases storage risk by 1200x.
- Coordination burden is basically zero at the "how it works" layer.
(4) No need to defend a node/mempool ecosystem.
- No nodes.
- No mempool.
- No UTXO set to bloat.
- You don't need an army of volunteer maintainers to keep "gold full nodes" defensible.
- Less coordination tax, fewer sociotechnical attack surfaces.
(5) Gold expropriation requires physical enforcement, not just data + policy.
There is no universal gold UTXO set or "travel rule".
Expropriation requires either:
- Knowing where the gold is (vault, safe deposit box, storage facility).
- Or house-by-house enforcement with massive manpower/legitimacy cost.
In practice, enforcement tends to focus on:
- Formal channels (vaults, dealers, banks).
- Border crossings.
- Declarations above thresholds.
@Daedalus also opened my eyes to some very significant issues regarding Bitcoin hardware wallets.
TL;DR - I'd imagine the government has access to the vast majority of seed phrases.
From what I've researched, getting this risk to zero is extremely hard (if not impossible). It can be minimized with multi-sig, heterogeneous devices instead of trusting any single black box.
Just one of the many issues are "secure" elements in which many wallets store the seed phrase.
A secure element (SE) is:
- Closed-source silicon + firmware
- Designed and signed off by a tiny number of entities
- Certified by processes you don't control (Common Criteria, labs, NDAs)
- Distributed at scale into "secure" devices (wallets, phones, SIMs, payment cards)
Secure elements are perfect for creating choke points where keys & identity cluster:
- Centralized design
- Long lifetimes
- Hard to inspect physically
- Wrapped in "security" narrative
So if you assume a serious state-level adversary wants that lever and can get it sometimes, the right prior is:
- "Treat any closed-source Secure Element as potentially backdoored if you're defending against a nation-state"
That's not the same as "we know for a fact every Secure Element is backdoored". We don't. Lacking verifiable proof is exactly what makes this such an asymmetric control point.
Dice-based seeds fix RNG trust, not key exfiltration. If a device ever sees the full seed, a malicious Secure Element/firmware can leak it later.
The only real structural defense is collusion forcing:
- Heterogeneous multi-sig (different vendors + DIY),
- Multi-source entropy (XOR’d seeds),
- Passphrases kept off the compromised device,
- Independent stacks for different key shares.
There is no neat solution that makes you "immune to NSA". The best you can do is:
- Make mass, silent theft via one corporate/vended rail impossible,
- Force any serious adversary into messy, noisy, manual operations if they want you specifically.
A state-level actor can plausibly:
- backdoor RNG/nonces,
- exfil keys via signatures,
- coerce vendor into "minor tweaks",
- intercept shipping,
- or just use host+legal leverage.
(6) Gold doesn't need electricity, internet, DNS, app stores, or routers.
- You can transact in a blackout.
- You can pay a smuggler without any digital evidence.
- You don't care about packet filtering or "crypto port" throttling.
There are many more examples of where Gold has an advantage over Bitcoin.
And of course, Bitcoin has many advantages over gold (teleportability, shock convexity in a specific Great Taking scenario, programmability for complex, conditional arrangements, granularity in price discovery, verifiability, etc.).
That's the point, gold vs bitcoin is a stupid debate.
BTC sovereignty is mathematically elegant but socially expensive and perimeter-fragile.
Gold sovereignty is technologically dumb but perimeter-resilient and legally fuzzier.
Both are useful, but for different failure modes of the system.
The same exercise can be repeated for Bitcoin and Monero. Both have their advantages and disadvantages.
