The latest question to plague a certain kind of investor is if they should invest more in cryptocurrencies or precious metals. It's a tougher question because the industry insights that you will be find are so obviously skewed by the writer's or publication's bias. In other words, if you see an analysis on a precious metals site, it will be skewed to gold and other PMs. If you see a similar article on a site that's dedicated to alternative currencies, you'll see the bias swings that way. Who is right, and who can you trust?
The Case for Gold
Obviously, most readers here in SteemIt will have an e-currency bias. Gold, silver, and their ilk have been around since the dawn of civilization. In all that time, precious metals have been proven to hold their value, though sometimes the graph runs in peaks and valleys in one direction or another. Gold is shiny, tested, and you can hold it in your hand. Typically, fear of losing other forms of value drives big spikes in price.
The good things about gold, silver, platinum, palladium, and so on are they are tangible and have an intrinsic value. The market value may climb over the intrinsic value, but that's usually because nothing else can store value so well. It's like having little, shiny pieces of real estate that you can put in your pocket.
The biggest downside of precious metals is that they are seldom a way to enjoy quick growth in value. They're more like insurance.
The Case for Cryptocurrency
Cryptocurrency drives the new technology of blockchain. It also represents the transformation of our digital society. Of course, many critics say that you don't really invest in cybercurrency as much as you speculate in them. However, people have been making plenty of real money from this speculation, investing, or whatever you want to call it.
So, Is Electronic Currency or Precious Metals a Better Bet?
Obviously, if you look at the last year, you could have made a lot more money with your Bitcoin investment than your gold investment. Still, precious metals haven't exactly lost ground. A safer bet might be to split up your investment money into shares of these kinds of financial vehicles that you're comfortable with -- and of course, others.
What do you think? Can you still make a case for gold in this Digital Era?