Recently, I saw a debate between the founder of a certain exchange and a traditional investor about gold versus Bitcoin, and suddenly realized an often overlooked issue: our trust in gold may be built on a foundation that's not as solid as we think.

What is the actual reserve of gold? How many untapped veins are hidden deep within the earth's crust? There are no precise answers to these questions. Advances in technology have already enabled the lab synthesis of diamonds—who's to say there won't be a similar breakthrough with gold? A more realistic threat is the potential discovery of a massive gold deposit somewhere, which could greatly increase supply and shock the price system.

Bitcoin operates on a completely different logic. The total supply cap of 21 million coins is directly written into the code—this number doesn't rely on geological surveys, isn't affected by technological advancements, and won't change because of new discoveries in any region. This scarcity is a mathematical certainty, not just a "temporary scarcity" in the geological sense.

Last week, when chatting about this topic with a friend in Xinjiang, he happened to mention a newly discovered gold mine in the area. I tried to explain how Bitcoin works, but he insisted it was "some country's conspiracy" and would collapse sooner or later. This perspective doesn't really hold up to scrutiny.

If hash algorithms could really be broken easily, attackers could simply forge transactions and tamper with the ledger—if it were that easy, why would notorious hacking groups bother training hackers to steal coins? Why would politicians spend real money to buy it? If any country could truly control the Bitcoin network, why can't they manipulate price fluctuations or hash rate distribution?

The fact is, Bitcoin miners are spread across China, Kazakhstan, the US, Russia, the Middle East, and other regions. Hash rate data is completely public and transparent, and the underlying code is maintained by a global developer community. This isn't a conspiracy designed by anyone; it's a financial experiment driven by cryptography and distributed networks.

Gold's value depends on "everyone believing it's valuable," while Bitcoin's value is based on the fact that "it can't be inflated mathematically." Which one would you choose as a long-term asset?