This post is a Jobs to be Done analysis for Gold, the precious metal and comparing it to Bitcoin.
If you are new to the Jobs to be done Theory, here’s a quick summary
JTBD Theory
JTBD was popularized by the famous Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen who is well known for his Disruption Theory. Anthony Ulwick and others have also have a big role in putting this theory into practice as well.
The theory states that Customers don’t buy your products, they hire them to get a job done. If there’s another product/service that gets more of the job done faster, cheaper and more accurately customers will fire your product and hire that instead.
The jobs remain stable over time, even as the technology changes. Jobs have Desired Outcomes or Needs which also stay stable over time.
For example, the job of listening to music has stayed stable over time and the technology has changed from Walkman to Mp3 players to streaming services. Another example is the job of filing taxes has remained the same while the technology has changed from pen and paper, to desktop software to taking a picture of W2 on your phone.
In this post, I will try to take an example of what jobs people hire Gold (old technology) to do and see if Bitcoin (new technology) does those jobs faster, more accurately and cheaper.
To explore what jobs people may hire Gold to do.. Let’s go back in time to 1947..
1947 – Partition of India and Pakistan
For those who aren’t aware of what happened at the time, by some estimates roughly 2 million people lost their lives and 14 million were displaced and lived as refugees.
As I grew up in Punjab, all of my friends and I had heard stories from our grandparents about how well off they were on the other side of the border and had to run overnight leaving all their belongings behind to save their lives, and they had to start their lives all over again from zero. We’ll try to explore the jobs that gold can be hired for with a background of partition in mind.
Stage 1 – Run to save your life
At the time of partition, Gold would have been the most useful asset as it was easy to carry around large sums of money and would have been easily transportable. In comparison, if you had a very big house you couldn’t move your real-estate as it’s not transportable. You would have to leave the house behind. During this transfer you would have liked to minimize likelihood of your gold being stolen or misplacing it, these would be a needs related to the job. Each job can have multiple needs associated with it.
JTBD 1 – Transport value over distance
Examples of few needs associated with this job.
- Minimize the risk of value getting stolen
- Minimize the likelihood of losing all or some percentage of the value in transfer
- Minimize the time it take to transport the value
- Minimize the value lost to wear and tear (durability)
Stage 2 – Find shelter on the other side of border
You reached on the other side of border (hurray!) and now you want to find some safe place to stay. You may want to exchange some of your gold with someone in return for shelter. This leads us to our Job #2
JTBD 2 – Pay others for goods and services
The needs associated with this job might be –
- Minimize the likelihood of overpaying or underpaying others
- Minimize the % of value lost in transaction fees
- Minimize the time it takes to complete the transaction
- Maximize the number of people who you can trade with
This is an area where Gold would struggle. If you had a 8gm gold coin, it won’t be easy for you to give 0.01 gm to someone. You could trade it with someone for currency, but then those choices would be limited, as regular people may not be able to distinguish between 22k gold vs 18k gold. You could go to a jeweler and he/she might try to con you as well and not pay a fair price.
Stage 3 – Establish life again
Now, you are settled fairly in the new country, and you still have excess gold left. You deposit it in a locker in the bank or bury it in the ground in a secret place and come back to recover it in 5 years. Gold would still be in a good condition given the durability of the gold, which we can’t say for paper money. But not only that, Gold would have still maintained it’s purchasing power. That is because Gold is globally scarce, we only have 1.5% of new gold being mined every year. The supply is constrained and the demand has been there for last 5000+ years, so gold would have done well with the job of maintaining purchasing power thanks to it’s scarcity.
JTBD 3 – Maintain purchasing power over time.
Some example needs could be –
- Minimize the value lost over time due to wear and tear
- Minimize the value lost over time due to discovery of new supply
1947 vs today
Although it may seem like that the situation described above of Partition may be unique and a one time event, it isn’t true.. In the last century, there were many times in different countries where people have faced similar situations – Jews during the time of Nazis, more recently people in Syria, Venezuela, Afghanistan have been trying to find refuge in other places.
And even you and me, who may not be refugees but we are struggling to maintain the purchasing power of the paper money with skyrocketing inflation thanks the ton of money printing by so many countries in response to COVID.
Also, as mentioned earlier based on the JTBD theory, the jobs remain stable over time. So the 3 jobs that we have discovered are also stable over time.
Another job people hire Gold to do is to make jewelry. But being a Male, Engineer, MBA – I wouldn’t dare to comment on that job :). I don’t claim to understand it either. I’ll conveniently skip that from the rest of the discussion.
Gold vs Bitcoin – JTBD Analysis
Gold was the best technology for the last 5000 years to get these jobs done, but with Bitcoin entering the scene we have a competitor that does these jobs faster, cheaper and more accurately than Gold.
Now let’s compare how Bitcoin performs the jobs mentioned earlier.
JTBD 1 – Transport value over distance
If you had bitcoin in 1947, you would just store your wallet key on paper and try to cross the border. Transporting value over distance wouldn’t need anything more and would be done automatically.
You can transfer thousands or millions of dollars across geographies using Bitcoin in a matter of seconds or minutes. So, bitcoin is faster for this job than gold.
It is also more accurate, as there will be an automatic ledger entry created, and no one can argue if the transaction was off by a few hundred or thousand dollars.
It would also be much cheaper, as you don’t need to transfer a physical good, that would need to be secured by humans or spend anything on flight tickets, shipping etc.
BTC is a clear winner for this job and 100x at least..
JTBD 2 – Pay Others for goods and services
Bitcoin is a winner here again. Not by much though. It is hard to use gold for this purpose because Gold is not easily divisible or even the purity of gold is not easily recognizable.
Bitcoin beats gold on the dimensions of divisibility and recognizability. 1 Bitcoin is made up 100,000,000 Satoshis and you can transfer 1 satoshi worth to someone.
Why I said that Bitcoin wins but not by much is because people don’t use bitcoin extensively for this purpose today as the transaction fee are a few dollars, which is still quite high. So, you wouldn’t use Bitcoin to buy a bread or fill gas in car. Moreover, the bitcoin price has been rising and people don’t want to risk losing potential gains over pizzas. Example, someone spent 10,000 bitcoins for buying 2 pizzas in 2010.
BTC is a clear winner for this job as well, as it is faster, cheaper and more accurate to pay others for goods and services using Bitcoin compared to Gold, but may be 10x this time
JTBD 3 – Maintain purchasing power over time.
Gold has maintained it’s purchasing power thanks to Scarcity and mining of Gold being hard. But, Bitcoin is more scarce than Gold. There is 21M supply that is fixed and known. Only 21M bitcoin will be ever produced. No more. It’s part of the code
With Gold’s 1.5% supply increase every year, gold in your locker loses the value by 1.5% every year, unless demand continues to grow.
This is more of a social/emotional job than a functional job, as the demand of Gold or Bitcoin is dependent on how many people find it valuable, which is subjective. So it’s hard to apply the faster, cheaper, more accurate lens to this. But you can think of maintaining purchasing power as a form of progress that you are trying to make in your life.
The plus point to Gold here is that it has much longer history of proving that it can hold purchasing power compared to only 12 years of history of bitcoin. But if those 12 years are anything to go by, Bitcoin has not only maintained but significantly increased the purchasing power of holders.
Summary
Bitcoin is a better technology than Gold for the jobs described above. So based on the JTBD theory, over time people will fire Gold for doing these jobs and hire Bitcoin and other digital currencies for the same jobs.
What does that mean for you and me?
Gold’s market cap today is $11.8 Trillion and Bitcoin is $1.1 Trillion. Over time, Bitcoin will eat market share from Gold. If you think, you are late to buy bitcoin, you are not.
Disclaimer – This is not a financial advice, please don’t sue me 🙂 if Bitcoin drops tomorrow by 40%. As I mentioned in an earlier article my policy is to define a %age allocation of my portfolio that I want in Digital Assets and slowly try to accumulate them over time.
This is not a price projection for Bitcoin. This is my analysis as a student of technology and business based on my 15 years of experience working in Technology as an engineer and as a Product Manager.
In the next post, I’ll discuss how Ethereum and the Decentralized Applications built on top of Ethereum are disrupting Traditional Finance such as banks, insurance etc.
Next Steps
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