Otage. The evidence is that many countries are buying gold. Russia, for example, bought 201 tons last year. So far, I have not heard of any country buying bitcoin for their reserves. Maybe that's because the $12 billion Russia spent on gold exceeded the entire market cap of bitcoin last year. The trouble with gold is that the more you buy, the higher the price. The higher the price, the more it encourages miners, which then increases the supply.
On the other hand, bitcoin's supply is capped at 21 million coins, whatever happens.
I guess central banks will start buying bitcoin when the price reaches a billion dollars.
Thanks for your reply. Yes, although there is a finite supply of gold in the earth's crust we probably have only just scratched the surface. Its like "peak oil." A few years ago when prices shot up people declared that we had reached "peak oil" and we were on a worldwide downward trend of discovery and production. The world would be thrown into chaos without enough oil to meet demands. New finds and new extraction methods have proved that that is not the case and oil prices have declined again. As you point out the Bitcoin market cap is still in it's infancy so it will be interesting to see where it goes and which central bank is going to be the first one to jump in and reap the rewards.
I like that: "which central bank is going to be the first to reap the rewards.". I wonder what it would do to the bitcoin price if a government or central bank announced that they would even consider it. Imagine it is little Switzerland, which has the fifth largest foreign currency reserves on the planet.
Yes I read from @jrcornel that some jurisdictions in Switzerland are accepting limited amounts of BTC towards tax payments. So it appears they are dabbling although most likely the BTC from tax payments is immediately converted to Swiss Francs.
In Switzerland, there are 10'000 train ticket machines that also sell bitcoins.
cool