Pay attention, chodpaba...

The USD is not the primary concern among the savviest of HNW entities: it is the accelerating decay of our entire monetary system. They seek vehicles that will bridge the gap from the existing system to the next iteration. This is why many luxury assets have been rising.

As usage of the present system grinds down, wealth held within it will deteriorate at a blistering pace while the new system receives that outflow. Whatever forms the foundation of the new system will be fought over like a natural resource until transition volatility has subsided.

There is no universally-accepted asset capable of acting as the basis of a new monetary system other than gold. No paper contract, asset exchange, or altruistic dogma suffices. Nations have the same concerns an individual has: possession is 9/10ths. If an asset is within your dominion, it is yours.

China can physically relocate precious metals. It cannot do so with productive farmland located outside of its borders, or machinery used worldwide. Nations need a stable, immutable asset with no dependence upon foreign support.

While Bitcoin fits the bill, it is not pervasive enough yet. Gold is the transitional asset for at least the next few years, with other monetary metal playing lesser roles. By 2020 this may shift in favor of crypto.

Bitcoin is a new form of preservation, unproven to many but rapidly gaining acceptance and viewed as a place to park a small percentage of wealth.

Edit: fixed quote, added final statement.

Exactly.  I just checked and it's still going on and it's not like it's that incredible of a deal, you can probably find physical gold at $30 over spot from many dealers.

I watch the show, it's very entertaining but anyone who watches the show knows how big these guys are on PM's.  The father basically hordes silver.  In fact he even hordes pennies.  There was a show where he had these huge 5 gallon buckets full of pennies, so many that it was sagging the suspension in his car (he was hiding them in the trunk).

Guys in this business need to make a profit so maybe he is having a problem finding PMs at a price where he can make a profit but for the average person, you can easily find physical at prices very close to spot, as I have pointed out.

http://www.nhforliberty.com/ron-helwig-discusses-shire-silver-and-bitcoin-at-2013-nh-liberty-forum/

This guy, Ron Helwig, really gets it. I'm glad he's a part of the Free State Project, something I am seriously considering in the future, maybe even as just as a first home.

it's "barbarous" relic.

unless you're calling miscreanity a barbarian. 

Difference is Gold/Silver are probably near the bottom of their down-leg, though I would not rule out another 25% while  Bitcoin probably has another halving, and possibly two before complete loss of hope.  Both are probably several years away from the point where I would ideally like to withdraw some value.  Hopefully my fiat supply (won't end up funding a bail-in, and) will last that long, and I am already resolved to defer some toy purchases to stretch this out.

These are just my non-professional guesstimates though, and I'm always happy to be wrong.  As always, significant external events could intervene with any natural cycle...and very well may in this case.

I will say that if I happened to know I needed the money I had in Bitcoin over the next year or two, I would be taking at least some of it now to avoid doing so at fire-sale prices.  Actually, I would have been doing so a month or two ago.  As it is, I see a reasonable likelihood of yet another significant leg up hopefully well into the four-figures.  It's just that it might take some number of years.

how does that even hurt in fact it makes the remainder more valuable

Great charts in this article from Tocqueville's Hathaway.

Especially important is the chart of premiums:


Keep in mind those are wholesale premiums. That will accelerate very quickly as physical shortages become more apparent, starting with Asia and India.

They bought a bunch from the IMF a while ago as I recall.  I don't remember exactly when, and of course I have no idea if they managed to take delivery.  I would not be one bit surprised if they got the shaft unless they were willing to be content moving some paper around describing ownership of phyzzz in London.  In any event it's not like anyone is under an obligation to divulge exactly what they are doing.  IIRC, China's holding like doubled over one night.  I don't treat any statement from any government as gospel for this sort of thing personally.

Seems that in ~chodpaba's world, though, what happened with gold several years ago is meaningless now that in a giant and sudden shift everyone is rejecting gold as a representation of value...for the first time in about 5000 years.  I'll buy into that in a heartbeat as soon as I hear credible stories of cost effective nuclear transmutation.

We do new things all the time.  A better question was when was the last time a bedrock and universal behavior such as storing wealth in PMs stood for such a length of time just vanished?  It takes some rhetoric to argue that gold is a forgotten relic when there is so much effort on the parts of central banks keep it in their vaults (or pretend to anyway.)

I actually mostly respond here to say that I had not exposed myself to Sprott's latest KWN interview when I penned about India several posts back, and I believe I can honestly say that my musings about the posture of the Indian government were almost exclusively my own thesis.  Then I listen to Eric Sprott and he says almost the exact same thing.  Had he not said it first, I would have been suspicious that the guy reads this forum.