Thanks for the suggestion; I'll check it out Burst Assets when I have some time - sounds interesting.
Good latter question. The reason is that gold is money like bitcoin and holds many advantages that cryptocurrencies don't have, such as useful in industry, physical and reputational. Both gold and bitcoin make a great combination since they both complement each other, one being physical, one being digital.
That being written, neither gold nor bitcoin are investments - they are money and that's what they excel at being. A good comparison is the DXY, or Dollar Index; both gold and bitcoin have routed the DXY. Still, neither are investments that earn a return and this series looks at investments that earn a return through dividends.
Very good questions.
An interesting ICO that starts in a few days is also offering dividends: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1587736.240
Excellent; will investigate that too.
Just read up about the DXY. It seems a bit arbitrary to use only certain currencies and have them weighted like they are as a comparison tool. I guess it was from back in the day.
When you say Gold and Bitcoin have routed it what do you mean? That it's meaningless because those currencies aren't taken into account?
Are there other indices that measures all major currencies against one another weighted in other ways?
Good questions; those are the traditional currencies measured against the Dollar. I agree it should be updated.
The DXY in 1971 was over 100, but not too far above it. Gold was $35 an ounce. The DXY is lower today and gold is much higher. Gold performs well over time as money - it is not an investment. What you can buy with one ounce of gold today is also similar to what you could have purchased with one ounce of gold in the Roman Empire, that's how well it does through time. I'll leave bitcoin aside as it's very new relative to the DXY. Gold has routed the DXY in that the DXY in 1971 was higher than today while gold today is higher than it was in 1971; one could argue they could earn interest on a savings' account, and that's true except they would be missing on the possible opportunities of pair trading currencies. When looking at money being money, gold is one of the best over time. No one allocates 100% of their wealth to money - most wealth is an investment and thus only a small portion of wealth should be in money.
I'll post someday about various ways of measuring currency values, along with my preferred method - that's a much longer answer!
Thanks bro. I look forward to your posts. They're really interesting and super clear. Often this crypto/finance world is a minefield of jargon and convoluted ideas.