Topic: Bitcoin vs. Gold - is market cap parity utopian? (Spoiler, no!) (Read 898 times)

The investors who have lost interest in gold are mainly retail investors like us. Most of us are no longer interested in gold because it has become stable and no longer gives high returns. While we are the ones who want to get rich with our small capital, that is why we see bitcoin investors in the early years were mostly young people. But as bitcoin becomes more legitimate and bitcoin ETFs are approved, more people will invest in bitcoin, not just young people.

On the other hand, for large investors, gold will always be the top priority in their portfolio because what they care about more is safety and stability.

I also disagree when I say: bitcoin has surpassed gold's dominance, it will come but not now.

In his latest presentation at Cantor, Micheal Saylor stated that Bitcoin could get to 6.22 times the gold capitalisation by 2040.
Pretty aggressive stance to me, not only in terms of Market Cap, but in terms of time horizon.
Hopefully, he's right on this.
I don't want to post it here, as it would be an extreme cross post but it's not difficult to find it!

I do not agree with you that people are losing interest in gold because they learned about the existence of Bitcoin. Conservative investors still hold a very large share of their portfolios in gold and they consider Bitcoin a risky asset for investment, in fact, there are a lot of such investors around the world.

BlackRock began to change their opinion on this well, they repeatedly repeat in their interviews that Bitcoin can be considered a reliable asset, and the BlackRock Bitcoin ETF under the ticker IBIT has outpaced the gold ETF in terms of asset value and it should be taken into account that the price of gold has now been high since 1980. So I think that this should become a very indicative factor for all investors who previously doubted whether it is worth investing in Bitcoin or not. On the other hand, the price of Bitcoin is now too high to buy it, experienced investors understand this well and may well pay attention to Bitcoin, but start buying it in the bear market, when the general euphoria ends and the price starts to fall.

From my point of view for ease of reference, it is more than reasonable for many of us to start to refer to quantities of satoshis, since it is seeming more and more impractical for any normie newbies to be shooting to own a whole BTC, and sure there are some who can fairly easily get to such quantity of BTC, but it seems a bit elitist and even impractical to be considering that the targeting of getting to 1 BTC is actually reasonable and/or practical for an overwhelming majority of normies who might be contemplating getting into bitcoin.

Essentially, they are likely going to need to start to think in terms of practical goals, and even getting to 1 million satoshis may well be difficult for a lot of newbie normies, so they likely are going to need to figure out some realistic quantiles of bitcoin to attempt to target.. perhaps first getting to 100k satoshis and then working up in intervals of 100k satoshis until they get to 1 million satoshis.. and so yeah, just keep working at it.. within their means and within their timeline.. and surely many times if guys are new to bitcoin, it may well take them 4-10 years or longer just to establish a reasonable position in BTC, and I actually know a lot of people who I have recommended getting into bitcoin and investing $100 per week, and for some reason they believe that is too much for their budgets and/or their psychology, and so even last year, I was starting to proclaim that a person who is just starting in bitcoin and ONLY putting $100 per week into bitcoin, they may well never be able to reach a whole bitcoin at that rate of investment. and surely $100 per week is $5,200 per year and $52k after 10 years, and so anyone wanting to reach 1 BTC or more is likely going to need to aspire to investing more than $100 per week into bitcoin, even if they might not be able to invest $100 per week right now, they might be able to increase their investment amount into the future.

At the same time, I doubt it is necessary for anyone to be putting artificial and/or unreachable goals in front of them, so they should be getting into bitcoin, yet trying to figure out some reachable goals, so in the beginning maybe they shoot for 100k satoshis and then push towards 1 million satoshis and if they are learning about bitcoin, then surely they can adjust their goals to be more aggressive in the future, if they come to realize that it might be in their better interest to do so.  People come to bitcoin within their own timeline, and surely a lot of normal peeps are going to end up having to pay way more for their satoshis due to whatever ongoing dynamics we have in which it appears that more and more larger players are starting to bid up whatever supply that's currently available.

We cannot turn back the clock, and we have to figure out what we are going to do in regards to our bitcoin accumulation journey from now into the future, and sure if we already have enough BTC or more than enough BTC, then sure we are not in a bad place, yet I doubt that there are too many folks, even members of this forum, who are really in a position to say that they have enough BTC or more than enough BTC... yet if they have already been accumulating BTC, and they know to accumulate BTC, then they surely are in a better position than the no coiner or the low coiner who does not realize that he doesn't have enough.


Of course, so many folks wrongly conclude that they are too late to bitcoin, and surely if they continue to fail/refuse to act to get bitcoin, they are ONLY going to make their situation worse by continuing to believe such nonsense.  But hey, there is ONLY so much that any of us can do to help normies to help themselves in the departmenet of getting started in their bitcoin accumulating (stacking) journey sooner rather than later.


I am not exactly sure about your description Onyeeze, since it seems to me that the main point is that the longer that bitcoin is in existence, the more and more people are going to recognize it as the more superior asset for holding its value for the various reasons that it is the best of monies, so value is going to continue to gravitate into bitcoin from many and most assets/currencies that have a monetary premium, even if it takes a while (50-200 or more years) to play out... and yeah, we don't have to wait 50-200 years to see the ongoing appreciation of bitcoin's price as value continues to flow into it.  The longer that people wait to get bitcoin, the more it is going to cost them to get it, so some people recognize bitcoin's value sooner than others, and sometimes it is not even because the earlier arrivers are smarter. Sometimes it may just be a matter of being at the right place at the right time and realizing that it is a good idea to get some bitcoin in case it catches on.

calculating when bitcoin was introduced till date you will know that bitcoin price is being getting increased due to the awareness or people the way people have known gold it is the way people have known Bitcoin both of them is a digital currency and the gold exist before Bitcoin but now bitcoin has taken over the market of digital currency because of it awareness and the eight investment method it is because of the investment plan of Bitcoin that makes people to lose interest in gold as a store value and the invest in Bitcoin so that is why when you are saying that Bitcoin does not have a population or bitcoin is just a new digital currency I will not disagree with you but the thing is that bitcoin has dominated over gold and the other digital currencies

The bolded part is about as correct as it could get. This is what I was trying to convey with my OP. The pace at which the network has grown (or the value of it) is so impressive that it's impossible to understand someone arguing it couldn't grow beyond gold. Of course it can... It exactly can because it had this growth and the growth is proof that people all around the globe and institutions and all other actors started rushing in while gold went about 2x in the same time. Bitcoin will grow when the global economy grows, and bitcoin will probably grow when the economy shrinks for certain reasons. This doesn't mean gold won't be stable or has to decline in value as a consequence, but there are so many other asset classes that people are invested in and not very satisfied with nor confident in.

I think that this bull run very well confirms what we have been talking about anyway and bitcoin is at any time set up to go for 25% in a week and it will continue like that. Scarcity will kick in, companies like Microstrategy take bitcoin out of circulation at a large scale, more people will set their goals to achieve holdings of 1 BTC and then if it becomes more expensive they aim for 1 mBTC and so on and so forth, but more and more people understand that not owning bitcoin at all will be an expensive mistake.

As the network grows further now and protects more and more value, the chance that politicians act against it becomes very small. It's a question of lobbies at some point too.

I have read a headline a moment ago "is it too late to get into Bitcoin?". I have read this headline ever since I found out about bitcoin and I thought damn it, I should have documented all those headlines every single time because they keep coming at all price levels.

Enjoy the ride JJG!

You are very correct.
We all know Gold has been in existence for thousands of years and Bitcoin just came in and has just been in existence for about 16 years now and if we check how Bitcoin is growing and making wave we will know that Bitcoin will surely surpass Gold as time goes on in it's market cap.
A lot of people focus more on Bitcoin investment than Gold investment this days because they have seen Bitcoin will be more valuable in time to come some government of nation are even investing on Bitcoin.
A lot of things that will replaced Gold are coming up every day and as time goes on the worth of gold won't be this valuable than as it is now.

Fair enough.  Apparently, the humor (or the actual point that you were making) went over my head.

The comparison between Bitcoin and Gold while only considering the assets’ market capitalization is rather lame if I’m to be honest. This is because there are several other notable factors that are beyond mere market capitalization that we should also put into adequate consideration before making such comparisons, factors such as technological advancement, there are also regulatory environments and most importantly, adoption rates. We can’t conclude on which asset is better/best without first considering these other factors.

It’s true that when we only focus on gold’s market capitalization lead over Bitcoin, we’ll be doing nothing other than to undermine and possible also overlooking the tremendous potential and growth Bitcoin has shown by moving from $4b market capitalization to $1.5tr in less that 10 years which we know shows quite a significant growth.
Bitcoin is still relatively a new technology and there are still enough room for more technological innovations and advancements, I’m pretty sure in a few years, there’ll be no more reason for such a comparison because Bitcoin market cap will surpass Gold.

JJG, buddy, I was being sarcastic calling that post "genius"   It was exactly as you said: the opposite.

(going to answer your post in more detail later)

I have nothing wrong with anything in your post, including that my understanding that there can be many of us bringing out various similar points, and some guys present ideas more clearly and scientific than others, and it can take a long time for ideas to sink in, including it can take a lot of time to grapple with some of the deeper ideas, and people will also learn from different ways of the ideas being presented.

On the other hand, I did not consider your above statement from EarnOnVictor to be particularly genius-worthy, and I in fact found it to be the opposite, especially since he seemed to have had been poo pooing the amount of bitcoin's growth in the past year or so by proclaiming that gold grew by something like $8-9 trillion in one year and bitcoin is merely just touching upon being around a $1.5 trillion asset.   Any guys who find wisdom in that level of dumbness are likely going to have fun staying poor and deservingly so for failing to have any level of smartness if they consider gold's doubling (perhaps over 13 years, even though much of it took place last year) has much if any meaning for gold's ability to be able to hang on to its market cap lead over bitcoin. 

Even if we compare bitcoin from 2015 to now, we would see that bitcoin went from something like a $4 billion market cap to $1.5 trillion, so continuing to poo poo bitcoin merely because it is small relative to gold seems to be completely missing the picture, to the extent that such framings is not being purposefully misleading.

Even if bitcoin does not reach gold's market cap this cycle (which might not even be that low of probabilities), there seem to be pretty decent odds that bitcoin is going to have a market cap that is multiples higher than gold's within a couple of cycles, and the comment about gold growing $8-9 trillion and bitcoin remaining ONLY around $1.5 trillion-ish is going to look quite dumb and quite blind to the current opportunity that bitcoin still presents to a lot of no coiners and low coiners who still have either completely not gotten started accumulating bitcoin or they have purposefully chosen to whimpily invest in bitcoin.

Sure it is possible that gold will double or triple again in the next 1-4 years, and even with bitcoin we cannot really be sure how its cycles are going to play out, yet it seems that the odds would still be pretty great that bitcoin will be toying around with gold's market cap and potentially exceeding it this or the next cycle, and sure it could take a few cycles before bitcoin's bottom price (such as it's 200WMA) is solidly above gold's market cap, yet still even from those price points, bitcoin is likely to be continuing upwardly and getting to price points of multiples and magnitudes higher than gold based on bitcoin's relative greater value that is still being figured out in the market over the coming 10-20 years and probably longer, and during that time still I would be hating to be holding more than 10% gold as compared with what I would be holding in bitcoin, and surely  even 10% is likely way too much, except for those wanting (perhaps purposefully) to have fun staying poor.

JJG let me say this for the last time, I am ALL for those other models not valuing bitcoin against fiat currency. I am all for it and I read it with huge interest and I have been thinking a lot about these things myself. What gbianchi has done here goes far beyond what I could have done within an hour or even less and it is great and insightful what he has created. But my goal was to simply demonstrate the pace at which bitcoin approaches parity with gold's market cap. You could use pretty much any denominator to demonstrate that and to just demonstrate this one single aspect, the USD is the most appropriate denominator I guess.

Bitcoin vs. gold comparisons can be approached on a whole different level as gbianchi has done. But to me it seems that you guys have skipped that I have intended for this thread to be relatively simple. That is why I did the standardization to 21 billion ounces, which contains rounding errors to say the least as the total amount of gold in the world is not exactly know, but approximately and that is why the number worked.

As gbianchi says

This is of course correct and the term you choose hits the nail on the head: "monetary premium superiority of bitcoin". There is nothing we disagree about here.

So let me conclude with one of the geniuses I was trying to demonstrate the bitcoin within just 15 years has cut down the multiplier from over 5 million to low double digits. You could also turn it around and talk in fractions instead of a multiplier.

One of the reasons why people already gravitate so much towards measuring goods, services, commodities, assets or other currencies in terms of gold is because gold tends to be a more reliable denominator - even though gold fluctuates too.

There are other less liquid things that we could use as our denominator, such as hookers, lambos and blow or yachts and private airplanes.

We could also measure in terms of BigMacs or medium home prices or costs of a normal shopping basket.  Some things are more consistent with the passage of time as compared with other things.. oh yeah, and we can choose a basket of equities (or surely various index funds do that too), but yeah, currently, when we measure against currencies, we can see that the dollar is the strongest amongst the current currencies available to choose from, so we would like to measure from the strongest one, yet we should also realize tht the dollar is not a very accurate measuring stick.

So yeah, I was criticizing you for gravitating towards feeling like you have to measure against the dollar or some other fiat when our more direct question, even in the title of your OP specifically says bitcoin versus gold, why is there a need for a third measure that is likely even less accurate than measuring in terms of hookers, lambos and blow... to the extent that the third measure is even needed at all... which I am proclaiming that you feel some kind of need to measure bitcoin against the dollar and then gold against the dollar and you are likely just convoluting and distorting the information by having the dollar in there in the first place.... and as a bonus argument, I am proclaiming there really is no need for any third measurement in there and let's get to the direct question and eliminate the froth and the distortions by measuring bitcoin against gold like your thread title proclaims to be doing in the first place...

start this thread over.. hahahahahahaha


Yeah, let's add that piece of shit to the discussion (if we really want to get distracted?). 

I will admit that I am being a bit overly flippant with you, since sometimes there can be some value in regards to adding in other comparison points, but I think that there is also value to start with the more direct one of measuring bitcoin versus gold, and if there is some value to secondary comparisons, then fine, but the main comparison seems to be valuing bitcoin versus gold and bringing in other assets/currencies that might or might not reflect something that we might be able to measure in the real world might or might not be helpful, yet it still seems less central than the direct measure between bitcoin and gold and how that has changed over time and how that is likely going to continue to change.

By the way, I have had been interviewing a few different guys in the real world to help me with some bitcoin related matters, and each of them devolved into discussions about Ethereum and some of the other shitcoins such as Solana and perhaps we mentioned a few others, which I am not completely opposed to accounting for various things going on in the shitcoin space, yet some of the frustration that I had in going down these paths of discussion is that the guys frequently were so much caught up in dollar pair analysis, and sometimes did not even realize the value of looking at ethereum with a bitcoin pair order to get some kind of a better assessement of what is actually happening in ethereum-landia... especially as compared with bitcoin.  So sometimes it can take a bit of time to get normies to wrap their heads around the value of skipping dollar as a pairing in order to get towards both a more profound analysis but also to consider ethereum versus bitcoin from another perspective rather than considering each of them in terms of dollars.

We even have that same problem with guys who seem to be completely focused on bitcoin (or bitcoin and the dollar), and so they might be trading or whatever, yet when they are measuring what they are doing in terms of the dollar, they tend to get mislead, especially the longer that we zoom out and surely maybe we are all thinking about dollar profits, but for sure, the ongoing debasement of the dollar can be difficult to account for and we might not really be able to appreciate bitcoin's superior long term performance when we are getting caught up in short term valuations that fail/refuse to capture that bitcoin is eating everyone's lunch, and likely going to continue to do so, even though sometimes on the short-term it can be difficult to identify exactly how much.


I don't see any major problem in regards to taking the market cap of each of them, and yeah we already know that if we are describing the market cap of each of them, then it already incorporates the dollar as the referenced denominator.. .. so tend to become oriented towards them in terms of even realizing that they are both going up, in part, because the unit of measurement is changing (debasing), yet at the same time, we likely realize that bitcoin is going up faster than gold in part due to its early adoption phases, so bitcoin is still in very early stages of price discovery.. which is what happens when people actually realize that bitcoin is way better than gold (perhaps in the ballpark of 1,000x or more better), and bitcoin is created (invented/discovered) in such a way that there is a realization that anyone is capable of holding it, yet ONLY around less than 1% of the world's population have ownership of it (whether directly holding it or having price exposure), and at the same time the ones who are likely hoarding and/or engaged in maniacal accumulation of bitcoin are a small segment of the population, yet they are trying to gobble up all of the bitcoin based on their speculation that everyone else is going to want this bitcoin too, once they figure out what it is.


No time soon are you going to catch me telling folks to either stop measuring in fiat values and/or keeping all of their assets in bitcoin (and not keeping any cash), even though surely there are some folks who have figured out ways for them to keep almost all of their value in bitcoin and then just cash out fiat as needed to pay for their fiat bills.  I don't recommend anything like that, yet hey people figure out their own ways of balancing bitcoin volatility as compared with fiat, which surely works out quite well during times like this when bitcoin is quite volatile to the upside, yet we likely realize that the overwhelming majority of time (even in bull markets) bitcoin tends to have a lot of volatility to the downside, so its upward volatility tends to be fewer number of days per year but still the kinds of days that anyone holding bitcoin is quite rewarded for being in bitcoin on those days rather than not being, and guys fucking around with their bitcoin allocation will sometimes not be enough in bitcoin during those few days of the year where bitcoin is irreversibly volatile to the upside and each of us would have hade been better to be "in" rather than "out" of bitcoin on those days.


In the end, you do whatever makes sense to you, yet I would consider that there could be some value to pick some unit of value of gold (there are charts that already do this), whether an once or a kilo or a ton or some other unit and compare it to bitcoin.  Of course, bitcoin is continuously going up in value regarding how many units of bitcoin it takes to buy whatever units of gold that you select... So to me, that seems to be the most direct way of measuring, even though yeah, the bitcoin and/or the gold is moving up or down in value relative to each other while still being able to be pegged to how many hookers, lambos and/or blow they can purchase (or whatever other outside comparative reference you would like to look at). 


Along with my earlier comment, I also think that being too narrowly focused on gold is going to contribute to a lot of under-appreciation of the monetary premium superiority of bitcoin, since monetary value is held in a lot of assets besides gold, and gold has been largely demonetized over the past 50-ish years - even though surely it has had its price runs within that time too.

The kinds of ideas presented by Jesse Myers in regards to how bitcoin is continuing to suck up monetary premium from a variety of assets besides just gold.

I think everyone should look at this thread, as we put a lot of effort into describing the final scenarios that might arise from a hyperbitcoinisation in which Bitcoin subtracts some value from Gold.
Also, there are a few trajectories to get to those scenarios, many of which involve multiple decades-long journeys.

take a look at this

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/a-logistic-model-of-bitcoins-price-5517489

I describe a gold-based pricing model

Since I was talking about market cap parity and you could take the Zimbabe dollar as well. It doesn't matter what you take, but you would need a  denominator and since purchasing power is still measured in some form of FIAT currency, there is no way around calculating parity scenarios as of today.

The ethereum part was provided because I remember the talk back at the time how the ethereum community was trying to push an agenda with a lot of marketing money and tricks, but the agenda fell apart ultimately. The same way there are some guys claiming that bitcoin can't reach market cap parity with gold. You could take a basket of goods, but it will have to be based on something and for now people will use a major fiat currency or the currency of their home country to see what bitcoin is worth to them. Whether someone likes that or not, but whatever is your daily fiat currency, you won't get around using fiat to buy bitcoin unless you are providing services valuing them in bitcoin, but even then your counterpart is doing any comparison in the national fiat currency in 99.99% of the cases.

The USD in the table served aas the denominator for standardization to then see what fraction 1 mBTC used to be of an ounce of gold and what fraction it used to be over the years and then more or less as of today. I can't numerically grasp the philosophical idea of bitcoin carrying value outside the USD system entirely. I wanted to provide a quick overview of how fast the bitcoin network value developed compared to gold's USD-based market cap. That's what you can do quickly. I share your idea/concepts, but this isn't something you can put quickly into an excel table.

You are overly whimpy.  Snap out of it.   


 

By the way, I personally am not proclaiming that BTC prices have to go up or that gold prices have to come down in order to get the repricing in the 1,000x-ish arena.. and sure at the same time, since I am suggesting that it could take 50 to 200 years or longer for the pricing to work itself out, there is almost no way that I would end up seeing this in my lifetime, unless for some reason my shorter-timeframe ends up being too long.

So, yeah, since as I type this post, bitcoin is about 1/15th the price (market cap) of gold, then just on the face of reach what I would consider fair market valuations of gold relative to bitcoin, we are going to need to see bitcoin come up around 30,000x compared with gold in terms of today's market prices and/or gold come down 30,000x, which would be 1/30,000 (-99.996667%), relative to bitcoin... so gold would retain 0.00003333% of its current value, relative to bitcoin.

Sure, I accept that I might be off by a bit.


Call me a lazy butt.

I cannot read through all of that, and part of the reason is that I find that there is a bit of a faulty framework to get too caught up in considering the extent to which gold is currently monetized, and sure it is possible that if we looked back at gold historically - prior to the various ways that it has been demonetized, then perhaps we might be able to come to some fair value considerations of gold as compared to other monetary mechanisms, yet in the past 100 years or so, monetization has spread into a lot of assets, a lot of products, properties and derivatives of other products, so if we are going to attempt to valuate bitcoin's monetary properties as compared with other monetary vehicles, then we have to look at the so many ways that so many other assets and currencies have been modified, and consider that bitcoin is a much more efficient way to store money as compared with the so many ways that money is currently being stored, and sure perhaps bitcoin does not absorb all of world's monetary premium, I still think that bitcoin is going to continue to absorb a lot of the monetary premium of a lot of the places where monetization is currently taking place, and also more value is going to be created in the world while these dynamics are playing out in the next 50-200 years.

So perhaps right now the monetary premium of world assets, properties and currencies amounts to somewhere in the ballpark of $1 Quadrillion, and so currently bitcoin is about $1.5 trillion of that which is about 0.15%, and gold is about $17 trillion of that, which is about 1.7%.  Bitcoin could probably end up absorbing all of that $1 quadrillion, and yeah have the assumption that the pie is going to continue to grow (and I am not even referring to the debasement of the dollar) but instead in real terms and the likelihood of new inventions (and new value creation) that comes with improvements in technology.. just like value increased with the discovery/invention of electricity, improved transportation, the internet, etc.


Personally, I doubt that it is necessary for us to see the high prices that we project within our lifetimes, even though sure there is more practicality in terms of projecting shorter timelines.

One importance is that if we can see the trajectory, then we likely can also see directionally where we are likely going, if there are likely going to be bumps in the road along the way, and surely there also is importance to understand and appreciate that we are still likely to be quite prosperous in the shorter timelines, like 10 to 30 years, even though bitcoin will still be in route to higher trajectories, and we are likely better to be in bitcoin rather than not being in bitcoin.. and it still is going to take a lot of normies a decently long time to jump on board.


Maybe I am getting a bit confused, since shouldn't the more direct comparisons be bitcoin to gold? or gold to bitcoin?  Why do we need to have the dollar in there, or even in your OP, who gives any shits about how the largely irrelevant manipulated Ethereum might fit in there?


If we are talking about comparative valuations, I see no reason to get locked up into "our lifetimes" since we are not even going to be able to really figure out how long valuations could end up playing out, and whether gradually and then suddenly actually works.. or is it gradually and then continued gradually, yet we should realize that there is no such thing as completely gradually in the way that markets and battles (and wars) end up working.  We likely have the greatest wealth transfer known to mankind, so there is likely no way that such wealth transfer takes place without some collateral damage along the way.   You (we) can deny that wealth transfer is actually taking place to your (our) own peril.  People are not going to agree about wealth being transferred from them.. so yeah, the transfer is going to from the no coiners to the coiners, and the sooner that any of us becomes a coiner, then the more likely we are going to be on the receiving end of such wealth transfer rather than being on the giving end.

It needs some abstraction, which without knowing you, I believe you are able to do? (Not intending to draw away from the main topic).

Yep, basically this^^

The better money wins out and there is no doubt about that. Bitcoin opens up new options that gold could not have, compared to Bitcoin. But then again, comparing gold to Bitcoin only makes sense in a currency perspective. Outside of that, gold is used/needed for many things that Bitcoin cannot do, due to its non-physical nature. Comparing market caps based on that is a bit like comparing apples to oranges.

So measuring both in terms of market cap is not really going to work.

Great to see some more members chiming in here. I didn't want to get the same topic started for the 100th time here. That is why I decided to standardize an ounce of gold to mBTC and that worked out quite ok approximately (give or take). I think the table I created demonstrates the tremendous pace at which bitcoin did catch up with potential parity to gold.



I have provided the explanations in OP, but so far we went from mBTC being 5.6 million x of an ounce of gold to low double digit x. That's blowing my mind and this is more than just some speculative bubble. But please keep in mind I have worked with estimates and that is why I used the dividor 1/3. About 7 billion ounces of gold vs. 21 billion mBTC.

But @fillippone, a multiple can be 0.1x as much as it can be 1,000x as JJG said 1,000x would only be possible if value is shifted from gold to bitcoin or if we talk about hundreds of years and global net worth continues to expand. But let's focus on our modest lifetimes. I would say that the 5x sounds quite reasonable. Could be more, but we probably won't achieve 1,000x unless gold takes a nose dive.

Always happy about comments!

It's really nice to see that now more people are ready to agree with the old speculations like $1 per 1 satoshi or 1 Billion per bitcoin kind of stuff. Moreover, I am glad about being one of them and all my speculations were purely by considering the rest of the world population who are yet to buy their first satoshi and by "why not" kind of hunch feeling.

Thank you for linking here. I am always curious on all theories which are dealing about the final target of bitcoin price, final target in the sense, at least what I could see in my life time.

Dear lord!
I thought I was bullish as I thought about 5x the gold capitalisation. And now you are going to say me I am too shy.
There is a member on the Italian board that has published a little model. It is translated in English here, but I urged him to post as a new thread.
There you can understand my reasonings.

when you say multiple, do you mean 1,000x or more?

I would suggest that bitcoin is around 1,000x more valuable than gold, yet it could still take 50-200 years to reach that relative valuations reflected in its street price (meaning market cap)

If you are talking about somewhere between 10x and 100x, then you are likely just toying with the actual valuation that is more likely closer to 1,000x or greater.

Yet, whatever.. valuations can vary.. and surely it might take a while to actually see some kind of a fair valuation that takes so many years of back and forth to actually play out.. unless the suddenly part of "gradual and then suddenly" ends up playing out quicker than expected.

I particularly like thinking about bitcoin in terms of gold. I think it is a very sensible way of “purifying” bitcoin from the money inflation of the FIAT system.
So I haven’t any precise target in terms of dollar price, while I have a precise target in terms of gold price.spoiler alert: it is a multiple of the gold capitalisation.

Well, JJG, I wasn't particularly asking for the most extreme case, but if we get to the one of the most important characteristics that gives BTC value, it is its mobility. The mobility is unprecedented. It is unlimited. I wanted to use this as a symbol. You can literally take BTC to the moon. I therefore said if "psychopath" Musk can build the rockets, the chance that you can get your BTC with you is a million, a trillion times higher than being able to take your gold with you.

The advantages of BTC are just so plain that I sometimes don't understand why people don't get it. They want this physical aspect. If I can't touch it, it is not of value. While in the same time they would invest in an NFT for a piece of art. How is that possible?

Let's try to be a bit more realistic.

I was trying to give some kind of a benefit of the doubt to some kind of a scenario that could play out in which there was no longer internet, electronic communication and/or electricity and/or some kinds of a scenario in which bitcoin would lose all or most of its value due to such hypotheticals playing out and gold would become relevant as some kind of a monetary intermediary.  

I doubt those kinds of scenarios are very likely, and I doubt that spaceships would be a part of such a scenario.. and truly seems stupid for anyone to actually believe that within our lifetimes (even within 100 years absent some kind of strong evidence showing livable systems) any kind of quality of life could be achieved off of this particular planet.


I doubt that it is even very helpful to try to figure out how a variety of possible fringe scenarios might play out in order to attempt to figure out some kind of reasonable allocation in terms of bitcoin versus gold versus whatever else that we might want to invest into, and surely it can be difficult to get allocation matters correct in any specific way, even though there may be ways to have some directional correctness and also preparedness for a variety of possible directional scenarios, without necessarily getting into particulars.. so we should be attempting to prepare for a variety of scenarios, including more likely scenarios and at the same time having some preparedness for outlier fringe scenarios, yet it still seems a bit crazy to put more than 1% preparations into scenarios that may have way less than 1% chances of playing out...yet each of us has to figure out how much resources, time, energy and or value to place in each of a variety of scenarios that might even have fringe chances of playing out.

For Armageddon cases I would rather hold BTC. Can take it with me to the moon just in case the psychopath Elon Musk has the rockets ready. Can't take all the gold with me, but can take billions in BTC with me and the chance that in a nuclear war BTC is recoverable, the chance is much higher than any of my gold is recoverable during my lifetime.

It is pretty interesting how some people do either not understand, or lie about the facts.


I assume that you try to suggest that if Bitcoin rises, gold will rise by a lot. Can you please, I ask you for a last time, last try, have a look at my excel table in the first post? Do you understand why I standardized gold ounces and calculated the multipliers to mBTC? I have paid attention to the fact that I don't just write another copy thread, I wanted to share an observation that made me excited myself and I have never painted that picture so clearly for myself. That is why I did the maths. The fact of the matter is that BTC went thousands and thousands of X while gold did nothing but go sideways.

Now tell me about the simple arithmetic that you are finding to be true, just let us know.

My guess is if gold doubles for whatever reason, BTC will go at least 6x, probably 8x in the same time. Now my real expectation is even more bullish, but to not shy you away from saying something here, I want to try to at least give you another shot to explain your arithmetic (as it is so simple).

Note: talkimg.com seems to be down for the moment. I'll upload it as soon as I found an alternative. Just read my analysis and draw your own arithmetic conclusions.

Listening was valuable in the past, when Bitcoin was not.  So the value of Bitcoin is very high at present and its demand is increasing with time, but gold is a dead asset. Gold has gained only a fraction of what it was in the past, but you'll notice that the price of Bitcoin is averaging more than 100 percent plus every year. Both gold and banks are in the same category, but Bitcoin is much more modern and different from them and is the most powerful digital currency of today. 
With its price steadily increasing and getting older in the future, in just about 15 years, Bitcoin has created a lot of buzz around the world as the best coin in the world today.

You have already made your various arguments, and good for you if you love gold so much that you believe that it deserves any more than 10% the size of your bitcoin holdings, and even 10% may well be too much, and you can have fun staying poor if you are allocating greater amounts than that..

Also, if you are smarter than the bitcoiners and gold pumps while bitcoin stays stagnant, then great on you for being such a smartie pants in your playing with your dead rock that had not only been demonetized but paperized into mostly irrelevancy (if not its own death).

I love this argument exists because its probably bullish for both assets.   Most people are considering neither and the progression away from the status quo of decades has alot further to go before 'full' in any way.

   The world is heavily biased to FIAT and one particular brand of FIAT which is the biggest thing thats going to change.  I do doubt any singular path will become the new alternative and replacement for Dollar.   Even if you thought that, first the situation will fracture and many alternative assets will be used.   Thats my simple take.

Over thousands of years we have had much technological development, Bitcoin is unique but also its part of that process.  The only constant is change, we are and will change but also it wont alter that change has been considerable in the past also.

Its all fair discussion, go back to beginnings of BTC and Im sure it was debated similarly then also.   Why would Satoshi bother if gold is so great, he wasn't any fool and was aware of many details to the events of 2008 before and after, he did bother for good reasons.
   I see the point of gold is that it lasts without needing any central bank its just an element of some worth and characteristic; there is some small use for it and its unique.

  In my opinion its not in competition, ironically an ASIC BTC circuit would use gold most likely.  I dont see the decline of its use as its been unpopular at times previous also but on a long term time frame its always the same; it did arguably fall for most of a decade after peaking in 2011 (also 1981~).
  Karl Marx existed on 82 ounces of gold a year given by an industrialist friend, he is buried in London not far from where they set the world gold price twice daily.  I like simplicity but not absolute where we attempt to bleach out detail; life is alot more interwoven varied and repeating in a pattern beyond the brief generation we represent.

Let me be sincere with you now, I opened my mouth wide for seconds in amazement at what you said, what???

I would have loved it if you backed your claims with some points, perhaps some links and statistics to prove what you said. I won't say much, but let me say this, If Gold is a "dead rock" and is being "demonetized" as you claimed, how come it attracted over $5T in investment this year alone?

I think that I understood and sufficiently responded to your convoluted and misleading point well enough.


You are likely being sarcastic, and I was responding publicly, not to just you, since this is a public thread, and hopefully no one would have misunderstood your earlier point to suggest that any kind of meaningful allocation to gold would be prudent, except perhaps in some exceptional cases.


Yes.  Your version of the truth is to have some fantasy vision of gold, and hopefully, you are not just a little bit more invested into bitcoin, but instead something like not allocating any more than 10% the value of your bitcoin holdings into gold....

So for example, I tend to suggest that beginner investors into bitcoin consider anywhere between 5% and 25% of their overall investment portfolio into bitcoin, and sure they can go outside of that range, but that has been my recommendation since about early to mid 2020, prior to that I recommended 1% to 10% to bitcoin as a starting allocation, and surely each person has to tailor to his own situation so if he is more bullish about bitcoin, then he would invest towards the higher end of the range and if he is less bullish, then he would invest towards the lower end of the range.  In the end, surely any person who has studied bitcoin and/or his situation more would be able to go beyond what I was recommending as a initial starting range to consider.

My assertion is that if a guy had decided to invest around 15% of his investment portfolio into bitcoin, then hopefully no more than 10% of that would be in gold, so his gold holdings would be no more than 1.5% of his total overall investment portfolio.


I think that we are currently working with similar statistics in terms of bitcoin having right around a $1.3 trillion market cap and gold having right around $17 trillion market cap.  You seem to have a different spin on the significance of that, and whatever, you can spin whatever you like.  More or less right now bitcoin has about 1/15th of gold's market cap, yet at the same time bitcoin is likely valued around 1,000x more than gold, so it may well take 50-200 years for the valuation to be more accurately reflected in relative BTC versus gold prices, whether BTC goes up or gold comes down or some combination of the two.


First.  There is no need to bring up shitcoins, and to convolute the point with bitcoin "and crypto" since crypto is largely irrelevant.

Try to stay focused.  We are talking about bitcoin versus gold, so no need to deviate into gobbledee gook talk.


If you cannot recognize that bitcoin is already the superior asset and that value is going to continue to gravitate into bitcoin with the likely loss of more and more importance of value being stored in gold, then too bad for you to be failing/refusing to recognize, appreciate the more valuable asset (namely bitcoin) so that you would be able to allocate appropriately into bitcoin and mostly lessen or minimize your exposure to gold.

Yet, whatever, you can do what you like if you would like to stay allocated to gold then have fun with that... You may or may not be able to at least outperform the dollar, while at the same time your lunch will continue to get eaten by bitcoin if you know how to measure the value of your gold allocation as compared with the value of your bitcoin allocation.


Are you trying to convince guys here to allocate to gold?  Just in case gold might be able to pull a rabbit out of a hat?

You've been registered on the forum since 2015, so have you been able to figure out what bitcoin is in the last 9-ish years?  Do you think that governments, institutions and/or individuals or going to keep investing into gold when bitcoin is superior in terms of various money aspects?  Bitcoin is better in regards to verifiability, transportability, scarcity, divisibility, costs associated with third parties and other aspects too.   

You seem deluded if you are still on the gold train, or maybe you just need to spend a bit more time trying to study and/or figure out bitcoin - which more and more people are new to bitcoin and they are figuring out that bitcoin is amongst the best, if not the best of monies ever known to mankind, so even if it might take a bit of time for value to gravitate into bitcoin (as compared with other assets, including but not limited to gold), the process of value gravitating into bitcoin is ongoing, so best if you try to recognize it and get ahead of it, instead of denying that it is taking place.


As far as you know, you are praying for the old ideas to persist, even though a better monetary unit is here and even though many of the countries (big and small) are also getting more and more and more involved in bitcoin.. sometimes overtly and sometimes covertly.


Good luck with those old arguments and perspectives, you are going to likely need some luck when you have that kind of a perspective..,. but luck is not likely even on your side if you believe that you should be allocating into gold rather than bitcoin.. or even allocating any more than 10% of your assets into gold as compared with what you have into bitcoin.


In regards to bitcoin, monetary premium is the ONLY one that really matters.  Sure gold has some value in the physical world, but that is hardly what gives gold its value... and when it comes to monetary premium, bitcoin is way more efficient than a lot of assets in terms of how bitcoin is mostly only monetary premium as compared with other less efficient ways that value is held, whether we are referring to gold and its industrial use or we are referring to various other ways that excess value is held in residential properties, equities and in other ways in part because various kinds of fiats are ongoingly debased so people search where to hold their monetary premium so that their monetary value does not get debased away from them if they were to hold such value in cash.


It is not as good as bitcoin.  Sure it might do better than cash.. perhaps? but it won't do better than bitcoin in terms of being a hedge against the debasement of the dollar (and other fiat).  Try moving $10 million in gold versus bitcoin... also same thing is true with going across the borders with $20k.. try it with gold and see how it works out for you.


Where have you been in the last 10 years?  It is already happening, it continues to happen and it will continue to happen.

You can be blind to the matter, or you can try to get ahead of the matter.  The writing is on the wall, and sure, you can choose to ignore it and continue to pump gold as if it were to even have close to a chance as compared with bitcoin.. and you likely are not going to fare as well if you are overly allocating into gold as compared to allocating in bitcoin.. and personally, I think you are nearly completely wasting your time since bitcoin is around 1,000x better than gold, yet it is ONLY around 1/15th the price of gold right now in terms of market cap... so you make your choice about whether to do something now or to wait until the difference in value shrinks more. .and where bitcoin takes its rightful place of having a market value that is around 1,000x greater than gold.

I didn't say that the appeal of Gold has come to an end but it's nearing the end of it's popularity like it has been in the past

Sure, gold is a valuable financial asset and i do not argue the fact that a lot of people still sort after it and even though bitcoin has become a developing asset that will take over from Gold but it is understandable that there are people who will still choose Gold over bitcoin maybe due to affordability or just a normal love for Gold than bitcoin and moreover since there are people who could not afford Gold that's also same way there will also be people who may not afford bitcoin.

Bitcoin has shown good moves in recent years so it does not matter how long it will take to be considered as the best investment ever even though it's still developing.

To be fair, bitcoin is a worthy competitor to gold but it is still too early to say that the appeal of gold or the era of gold is over and now it is the era of bitcoin and crypto.

We should be realistic that bitcoin is still not as popular as gold, and gold is still the top choice of governments and major investors. As far as I know, countries like Russia, China and many others are still buying gold in large quantities, not bitcoin. That shows they still value gold more than any other asset for national reserves. Moreover, the demand for gold is not limited to being an asset or investment but it is also applied in many industries. So I think gold may no longer be an attractive investment but it is still a safe haven option, a hedge against future inflation.


As for bitcoin, it is considered the best growth asset ever, so it can surpass gold, but that will not happen in the next 1 or 2 years. We need more time for bitcoin to take over and become the best investment.

One of the things that is inevitable in life is revolution because that is what keeps the world advancing so i think the era when gold was seen as the most valuable asset is coming to an end since bitcoin has now surfaced and bitcoin will also continue to be in dominance till maybe something else evolve and also subdue the value of bitcoin but for now i doubt if there is anything than can contest in worth and values as bitcoin. Gold has been in dominance since 600 BCE so it's time for it to give way to the greatest invention of our time (bitcoin).

Buddy, gold is a dead rock, and it's getting demonetized, because it's no longer the best money. Back in the gold standard, and during the 20th century, it was the best money, but not anymore. It's not just Bitcoin, it's the fact that technology advanced, and we can extract gold much easier and in larger sums than before. This factor makes it less good as a money.

But even without that in mind, Bitcoin has been rising by more than 100% every year on average, for the last few years, while gold has remained the same more or less. That, alone, should answer your question.

For starters, you misrepresented the point, if you reread what you replied to from the beginning, you will realise that I wasn't talking about ROI possibility but the market capitalization, Gold is compressed to avoid inflation, so it can never beat Bitcoin in ROI with its current structure.

Nevertheless, it's my choice to put all my money in Gold but my experience in investment will not allow me, and a big Thank You for that advice, you deserve it. And if you must know, I invest more in Bitcoin than Gold for the higher ROI possibility (simple wisdom). But that will NEVER blind my eyes to the truth, unlike many others.

And when it comes to the asset that won in market capitalization, Gold has it, which was the genesis of this discussion unless you have different statistics from the one known by the world.

Through the years, we have had similar gold pumping and bitcoin naysaying discussions and the gold holders have not done too well as compared with bitcoin, so sometimes it is surprising to see those same largely debunked arguments reviving themselves.

Good luck with your gold investment (relative to bitcoin) you are going to need it.

Hopefully, you are not so short-sighted as to be putting more than 10% of your value into gold as compared with what you put into bitcoin (and even 10% relative to bitcoin might be a bit high), yet of course, you are free to allocate your time, energy and value however you like and see how it fares for you.

Nothing reads 14x in what you replied to, it's all about the market capitalization of Gold and Bitcoin. If Bitcoin rises 14x, will Gold remain the same? It's a simple arithmetic.

Really? That's a misconception, over $12T worth of Gold has been mined so far. But let's pretend such a huge worth has not been mined, don't you think more people will still prefer Gold because it is a name with physical representation than Bitcoin which is entirely virtual?

https://www.gold.org/goldhub/research/market-primer/gold-market-primer-market-size-and-structure.

You have not presented any reason why both gold and bitcoin is smart and/or why the holding any gold is actually smart, especially when bitcoin does almost everything that gold does, except better.  Perhaps the ONLY reason to hold gold is for Armageddon purposes, or perhaps if there is already a good gold network in your geography... .. yet there maybe quite a bit of prudence, even for the guy choosing to hold some gold to actually mostly move over to bitcoin with 90-95% of his value in bitcoin and perhaps at most 5% to 10% the value of his bitcoin holding might be permissible to hold in gold for Armageddon or whatever outsided scenario that is anticipated in which bitcoin might not be a possibility.


Huh?  Gold had largely been stagnant and losing value in the past 13 years or so, and surely in the past year, Gold has shown some life, but still does not necessarily mean that gold is a good place to put value in ways that bitcoin is not going to be better than gold.

If you had not noticed bitcoin is around 1,000x better than gold or perhaps more than that in terms of various aspects of moneyness, including but not limited to verifiability, portability, scarcity, divisibility, ability to use without third party interference and/or great costs and some other features too.


Gold will prevail how?  You mean continue to survive for a while during the time that institutions, governments and individuals are recognizing and appreciating that bitcoin is better, not only in terms of bitcoin already having had increased in value stupendously compared with gold and that the trend of bitcoin eating gold's lunch is going to be continuing, and yeah, sure gold will survive and flail compared with bitcoin, and maybe gold will do better than the dollar, though the dollar is not a very good measuring instrument.. .are you wanting to say gold is going to do as well as bitcoin in terms of hookers, lambos, blow and other real world goods, services and properties (such as real estate)?  I have my doubts, especially if you might consider pricing gold in terms of bitcoin rather than getting distracted into poor measuring sticks such as pricing in dollars (or other fiat).


yes they can.  Gold is inferior to bitcoin, and bitcoin has been eating gold's lunch and will likely continue to eat gold's lunch in terms of monetary premium kinds of measurements... but sure, you can choose to live in a fantasy and act as if gold is holding its own and blah blah blah, when it is not.  It is not holding its own in any material, meaningful and/or substantial way in comparison to bitcoin.


Gold is intrinsic because it is physical?  Get real... that is not sufficient, even though gold might will serve better than bitcoin during certain kinds of Armageddon scenarios that might end up happening.. perhaps.


Good luck with your distraction into believing that your gold is going to come even close to giving you as much stability and/or appreciation in the coming years.. and yeah, maybe you might want to discount me for considering bitcoin having more pumpamentals in terms bitcoin being in early stages of adoption, and sure yeah there is some unfairness in that, yet if you have some kind of clue about what bitcoin is, then you better be careful if you are allocating much more than 10% of your networth or  portfolio value into gold as compared with bitcoin... ... so whatever allocation that you have gold/bitcoin, you should be considering no more than 10% of the value of your bitcoin into gold.. but hey whatever you can do what you like and have fun staying poor in terms of bitcoin quite likely continuing to eat gold's lunch in terms oof the more sound money and the Gresham's law type principles in which the soundest money is spent last (which happens to be bitcoin and people are increasingly figuring out bitcoin in regards to its superiority to gold.. it is not just a "young person's thing" as you are trying to dismissively and erroneously framing bitcoin in such ways).

Capitalization doesn't require any extensive explanation as to how the term is defined. You could argue that the reasons for a certain capitalization to have emerged in the first place is complex and multifactorial. But this is where your post becomes interesting: it took gold thousands of years to build a market cap of say $17 trillion. It took bitcoin 15 years to build a market cap of $1.3 trillion. I am oversimplifying a few matters here, but you get the basic idea. Bitcoin got attacked 1,000s of times, by hackers and we don't even know by whom, but certainly by forks, by alt coins, by governments trying to regulate it to death via prohibition. And it still exists, is thriving and people around the world entrust the network with $1.3 trillion as of now. When people realize that it can handle that amount without taken down, the network is due to grow further.

In other words, the longer history that gold can look back on didn't hold bitcoin back from growing at an impressive pace, unprecedented pace. Considering this is a technology that nobody can ultimately control, I find that quite impressive. There is no person that arbitrates between parties like an Amazon customer care agent, but people started to understand that this job is done by a decentralized network in the fairest manner possible. Fully neutral via algorithmic determination. There can be now judge in the world being as neutral as the bitcoin network. Those things are complex and not easy to grasp for folks who get first involved with it.

Gold is easy, but make no mistake that many people don't know what purposes it serves beyond being used for wedding rings. But compared to bitcoin, I think gold has a lot of flaws. The degree of freedom it provides to you is close to zero if we define freedom by flexibility and capital mobility, being able to leave a country, being able to pay someone across boarders, being able to legally hide value from whomever, being able to protect it from confiscation, being able to split it in smaller units or aggregate it into bigger units as you wish, remain solvent and able to pay for things when your bank accounts got frozen, being able to shift value from inflationary assets to a stable or deflationary asset, being able to anonymously/pseudonymously transact (if you do it correctly), being able to fund causes important to you without getting caught or transactions getting blocked or you getting excluded from the financial system forever, etc....

There are so many things to mention why bitcoin is ahead that in my opinion the history that you are talking about only proves the point I mentioned above. What took gold thousands of years, bitcoin was able to build similar levels of trust in about a decade. We've already entered the range of trillions here. Yes it is still 13x or 14x, but that doesn't matter as much.


That is your opinion and I won't say that your personal, subjective point of view is wrong. But "it is no secret" sounds like quite a superlative to me and I am sure there are people who don't own a single ounce of gold, but thousands of bitcoin. But I would not call them "not smart" or "less smart" than someone who owns both

I think capitalization is something that is quite extensive to explain, but it is necessary to point out something, gold has a much longer history than BTC and that is something that has weight, now BTC is the asset of the future and many young people prefer BTC more than gold itself, so everything is a matter of changes in the world, the most accepted without a doubt is gold, but the most desired worldwide is to have BTC, both represent money and it is not a secret that having both is the smartest.

At the market level, gold has gained a lot of value, BTC too, BTC is expected to be the most important asset of the future and even so, gold will prevail, I would say that they cannot be compared, there are many intrinsic things that are different between the assets, much less put one against the other or in the form of competition, for me both are safe havens of value.

We don't even have to go to 2012 to make it look insane! Just have another look at my excel table in the first post, we have been at 1,287x in 2015 and 665x in 2016. It decimated the gap by 50x since then. This is still out of this world and bitcoin has been outperforming all asset classes for such a long time that even a year of two of consolidation and sideways movement is irrelevant, or maybe rather a good sign as it had tons of volume and it means that there is either some redistribution among folks around the world, or there is some very strategic accumulation going on. But the volume is there and it is not there because people have fun buying for 65k and selling for 65k the next day.

Gold currently represents about 3.6% of wealth. Bitcoin currently represents about 0.276% of global wealth. If I had to make a bet whether gold goes 10x first or bitcoin goes 10x first, I'd know in which basket to put my eggs. Gold has not much room to grow for very practical reasons. Of course if you are a billionaire and hold a few tonnes, it could still double in price or maybe triple and it is worth it since you are already rich. But where should it go? 33%, one third of global wealth? I know that global wealth can and will increase overall and then the relative numbers are a bit different. But as of now, bitcoin is the call if you want some substantial upside opportunity.


Peter Schiff is amazingly ignorant and twists the truth and other peoples' reasonable arguments by so much that I am sometimes shocked how he never gets lost for words... but to his credit at least the guy has a true agenda. He is talking bullshit for a reason.

@EarnOnVictor are you running a precious metal dealing company or are you sitting on a ton of gold? Then I would understand your fact denying approach to understanding bitcoin's potential. But if you are ignorant for no reason, then there are other issues that I can't exactly name.

In comparison to gold, bitcoin is winning MOAR bigger than gold, even if we start the measurement from 2012 rather than going to bitcoin's first few years of having little to no price... So even if we start bitcoin from $5 per coin in the beginning of 2012, it should be pretty fucking obvious that bitcoin has been kicking the shit out of gold, and any reasonable inference is that bitcoin continues to kick gold's ass and will likely kick gold's ass in the future.

So if you want to be a dumbass and consider gold to be either superior to bitcoin or even equal to bitcoin, then you can have fun staying poor if you choose to allocate in that kind of way or even if you choose to allocate anymore than 10% the size of your bitcoin holdings to gold, then you are quite likely failing/refusing to understand either bitcoin or gold, its current role in society and its likely future role in society... including that bitcoin is likely in the ballpark of 1,000x or more more valuable than gold in terms of its market cap and bitcoin currently has a market cap of about 1/15th the size of gold, so even if it might take 50-200 years or more for some kind of a reasonably more accurate reflection of the relative market caps of each (bitcoin and gold), you may well be uninformed and/or in a fantasyland if you continue to believe that currently gold is a good or even anywhere close to as good as bitcoin as an investment.


If EarnOnVictor is so dumb as to invest/trade in accordance with his dumbass proclamations, then surely he is going to be faced with a pretty damned high likelihood of having fun staying poor (relatively speaking).. Him and Peter Schiff.. to the extent that Schiff might also be investing in accordance with his proclamations of the supposed better value of gold versus the worser value of bitcoin.  Surely, some folks might not be so dumb as to actually invest (or trade) in accordance with their nonsensical (lacking in evidence/logic) proclamations.

It is good that you bring up the 14x multiplier because that is what I was trying to convey and what EarnOnVictor seems to not understand.

We went from a 5.66 million multiplier in 2010 to a 14x multiplier today. It is astonishing to see people ignoring those facts.

@EarnOnVictor, you registered just recently, but can you imagine what you would have said in 2010, 2011, 2012...,2016, etc.? The multiplier in 2016 was ~665x. Then the multiplier got decimated again within just two years to 50x. Guess what, it got cut down by almost 4/5th again until now (and a couple of times in the meantime).


Sorry dude, but I trust Bitcoin more than I trust you for very good reasons! You better use all your BTC to buy gold then! I mean you are still around here on the forum trying to make some BTC, huh?

I like how you said


As if that alone wouldn't be already insane. Try to create something out of thin air that is worth $1.3 trillion within 15 years...

This is not about Gold won now, Gold has been winning before our ancestors were born and it will continue to win because it is better preferred as a safe-haven asset during uncertain times, the physical presence is contributory as well. Like I earlier said, I do not want to compare Gold and Bitcoin again for many reasons, but still, I fault your statement that "I'm sure Bitcoin will beat the "gold's volatility"" without adding the provable/constructive reason why such will happen. We should stop living in the fantasy of what we believe will happen but what is feasible and provable.

Yes I agree with you, gold is winning right now due to global volatility, but Bitcoin really has tremendous potential. We are about to see a big bull market very soon, the Bitcoin market is going up again, and there is a very good chance that Bitcoin will become much more viable in 2025. Right now the stability of gold and sustainable income from real estate will appeal to many over Bitcoin, but in the future Bitcoin will be the most profitable.

And if we see Trump as the winner of the US presidential election, Bitcoin will definitely become more likely, because he has been announcing that he will support crypto for a long time, so we are sure that if Trump wins, Bitcoin will definitely go much further. And then Bitcoin will outperform everything including gold and real estate.

You don't believe Bitcoin can do a 14x, when it's been doubling every year on average for the last few years?

The physical value is only a tiny fraction of its monetary value. Gold is valuated at where it is, because it has had the best money properties until 2009. Same like, Bitcoin is valuated at where it is, because it is recognized as the best money in terms of monetary properties. It is not valuated at $1T, *just* for being peer-to-peer cash system.

Gold won due to global instability, that's why the gold price rise really high in this year. But, I'm sure Bitcoin will beat the "gold's volatility" in the next year since we're heading to bull season, if gold price can rise for 25%, Bitcoin will make it 100%.

That's true Bitcoin not yet become the safest asset for Average Joe, most still think gold and real estate are the most promising.

I'm done comparing Bitcoin with Gold, Gold will win some and Bitcoin will win the others, it has always been like that. I am also not one of the people who believe Bitcoin will meet Gold in market capitalization, and my reason is mainly that Gold has the physical value that Bitcoin doesn't have aside from the fact that it has existed for so long to have built the trust of the biggest guys in the industry.

Can you see the way Gold has garnered more trillions of dollars in just a year? Bitcoin couldn't even hit $1.5T till now. We should be realistic, Gold is so valuable and people will continue to hold it dear regardless of how we may pretend and it's not everyone who will trust the virtual Bitcoin, ever, trust me.

This part needs an addendum and some clarification.

Using the term "dominance" is wrong in my opinion. The correct term is market cap ratio. They basically took bitcoin's solo market cap and divided it by the sum total of an increasing number of shitcoins' market caps. For example right now there are about 10000 altcoins listed on coinmarketcap.com so that is 1/10000.

Additionally it should be pointed out that market capitalization is the wrong factor to even consider when it comes to altcoins because we have no way of knowing their true circulating supply (eg. ETH has 72 million premine most of which is not in circulation) and they can "print" billions out of thin air (you create a token virtually free with billions as its supply and with only $1 dollar price that is billions of dollars of market cap out of thin air).

Another reason is because compared to 2017 for instance, a lot of those shitcoins have died and a lot of the super hyped up and pumped shitcoins like ethereum got dumped hard. Lets not forget that ETH was once worth 0.15BTC and it is now only 0.039BTC.

I agree that there is no need for "gold money" doesn't need to come into bitcoin for it to go up since bitcoin has its own adoption but it is possible that because bitcoin is a new "asset" that people are investing into and as an excellent option for diversification, they put some of their money that was supposed to go into gold into bitcoin instead.

Besides lets not forget that the only reason why gold has been soaring over the past years is the global tensions and the fact that countries like China, India and others have been on a gold buying spree amassing large amounts of it in their vaults expecting the global conflicts to grow and the global economy to become unstable.
That means if all global tensions were to end today, in 3 to 6 months gold would crash hard while bitcoin would soar much higher than anything we've seen so far.

This is actually a good clarification regarding the term "winning". Yes, it is about the mechanism. But you could even overstretch the term "winning" as to call those winners who lose the least. No point of contention here though, the dollar will make you lose significantly. The scarcity aspect of BTC can't be replicated, neither can it be ported into another cryptocurrency as we have seen with all those forks. You can port the data and the balances, but you can't port an entirely genuinely grown network and BTC does have that advantage because it was under the radar for so long.

But the point of my post wasn't so much about a general comparison again because we have seen plenty of times. What I found interesting is rather the excel part and how quickly mBTC approached the value of 1 ounce of gold. That is why I put in some effort into the standardization as I admit, I wouldn't have thought myself about 10 years ago that 1 mBTC would become so valuable so quickly. In hindsight yes because this is the effect of decentralization and being open and public, everyone around the world can buy it somehow and keep it.

And then I saw so many threads who said at 1k that it won't go to 10k and at 10k it was said it can't go to 30k etc. That's why I thought the mBTC - oz. comparison could be interesting.

I added some data points like global wealth because some people (how I perceive it) think that a large chunk of global wealth privately held is parked in gold. But it's relatively small with around 3%. Considering this and then the trend towards digitization and all the needs and wants people have in terms of capital mobility and value preservation, I think BTC has a long way to go. It was mostly to give some people who have their doubts a bit more data to base their own conclusions on. I believe that the majority of the forum couldn't tell from the top of their head how much private wealth there is globally and how BTC relates to that.

A trend I am also observing is that more and more young people would get interested in BTC, but not so much in gold. If this generational change from physical to digital assets continues, then that is another catalyst for the price.

Its clear the idea of market cap is not a simple fixed target.   Gold was in a cyclical bull market before BTC even came into thoughts of Satoshi and today Gold reaches an all time high decades after.
   These two assets have another thing in common which is they both come with ridiculous targets higher, some say gold will be $10,000 an ounce and aren't joking.   For context the price was about 30 dollars per ounce beginning the seventies.

So there is alot of growth in gold past present and very likely the future.   Somehow we have to estimate if a fast car will be passed by BTC moving even faster.    I certainly think the peaks of BTC will exceed gold at some point, the sharp shape of BTC patterns and its ability to spike upwards can even put the commodity market to shame so peak price certainly.

The overall day to day of BTC being a stable market cap larger then gold would be a different consideration.  They both suffer alot of speculation which muddies the water.  I think both are bullish but if someone seriously said the price will half I would have to read the reasoning and timing as quite possible.

  Dollar itself has spiked upwards at times, its not a balanced situation and at times past USA has been 50% of global trade.  The dominance of USD was justified in those days but now I view DXY as about as stable as a melting iceberg, subject to dangerous alterations.  Invariably in decline, dont doubt it can turn on you and remains gigantic in its momentum & unavoidable when it moves.

   For starters DXY is a fake measure of value, its not reflecting real trade but both political and historic ties between countries.  With technology altering alot of the world beyond recognition its fair to expect BTC to do better of the two.  The majority of what I expect is volatility and erratic prices in all assets, instability favors gold which is probably rising upto this election result.  BTC benefits from weak dollar but will react differently to USD as it is a risk or speculative asset to most large market players.

It depends on how you define "winning". I suppose you refer to fiat currency. While USD is considered to be global reserve currency, I wouldn't call it a "winner" in terms of economic reality. People who save on the dollar are losing.

The best money will always rise to the surface. The market mechanism is simply too powerful to ignore, regardless of whether this world is governed by bureaucrats. If a bureaucrat says that bananas is good money, it doesn't make it good. It just makes anyone hearing him poor.

Even though you are probably correct in your conclusion that bitcoin is like gold but more than gold, your description of bitcoin being a store of value and a hedge against inflation does not differentiate bitcoin from gold since gold is also those two things.

What differentiates bitcoin from gold is that it is better money than gold.  
As compared with gold, bitcoin is:
1) more verifiable,
2) more divisible,
3) more easy to transport
4) more flexible in terms of programability
5) more scarce
6) less burdened by third party costs - including being able to secure..
7) and yeah there are probably a variety of other things, but who cares?

The above list is enough to establish bitcoin as not ONLY a little bit better than gold but likely in the territory of around 1,000x or more better than gold, even though bitcoin is currently ONLY about 1/15th the price of gold (in terms of total market cap)..  so if we might realize that currently, bitcoin is around 30,000x undervalued as compared to go, then we should be able to identify that bitcoin is a buy as compared with gold.. yet at the same time, even though through the past 13-ish plus years, the market has been facilitating the catching up of bitcoin to gold in terms of its market cap growing relative to gold's market cap, yet it surely could still take the market another 50-200 years to sort out these matters in terms of people realizing the fair market value of each of them relative to one another and also it may not be clear if gold has to come down in its price/value or bitcoin has to go up in price/value or a combination of both.

Sure, people are going to have differing opinions, and if you conclude that the current market value of bitcoin as compared with gold is fair or that bitcoin is overvalued as compared to gold, you seem to be living in fantasy land and/or denial like some of the loonies who believe either that you should have equal parts or that you should have more gold than bitcoin.. almost pure stupid, even though smart people believe that kind of nonsense, and also they hinge on the historical value of gold blah blah blah.. which seems also to be in a kind of selective denial and they are free to do whatever they want including likely coming around to the fact that governments and institutions are going to come around too. even though they are used to gold, why would they be holding the inferior money, since value gravitates towards the soundest of monies, which happens to be bitcoin if anyone had not realized and appreciated such factual matter.

what I meant by the statement "Bitcoin is Gold and more" is that like Gold it can be used as a store of value and hedge against inflation.

The US dollar became the official reserve because it was backed by Gold and was relatively stable.
Dominance of money is usually associated on how they can resist inflation.

I believe I understand what you were trying to convey. I am not sure about the phrase "Bitcoin is Gold and more" though. Bitcoin isn't gold, but it might be more than that. I understand there is some tricky rhetorics in my sentence. But I stick to it and since humanity values things in the name of value, bitcoin might indeed be soon more than gold.


Who claimed that a comparison is a definite need? I didn't. But I don't see a problem in comparing a plane with a bike. You can easily do that, crunch the numbers, look for carbon foot print, cost of maintenance, value generated and time saved, risk to die using one or the other, you name it. But since you already know it all, there is not much more from my side to add.

Thanks for the comment!


This is an interesting question here. Does best money always win? Or does most money in existence sometimes win because there are variables of control over the system and how the system is allowed to evolve?

But apart from that, I agree with you that in your and my opinion, bitcoin is at least the best competition we could hope for in the face of what we have right now.

Thanks for the comment!


How is it not proper to compare anything? I can compare asset classes, i can compare tools of any kind, I can compare SPVs, I can compare pretty much anything anyone wants for as long as they share at least one characteristic. I think bitcoin and gold do share at least one characteristic.

Thanks for the comment!


No one denies that? I don't know because I don't know everyone. Gold will exist forever because even if it ceases to be important, nobody would have interest in destroying it. This might be fundamentally different for bitcoin. But I personally believe that there have been tries to destroy or stop it, and the realization that there is no destroying or stopping bitcoin, the biggest players in the world instead decide to go with it. I have no hard evidence, but this is what I suspect.

Thanks for the comment!

No one denies that bitcoin is more profitable than gold because it is very small and has a lot of potential for growth. That is both the advantage and disadvantage of bitcoin because higher returns come with higher risks, everything is proportional to each other.

There is no guarantee that bitcoin will last as long as gold to be comparable to gold, everything is still unknown for bitcoin and when investing in it we are taking on greater risk. Gold, on the other hand, does not need to prove itself any further because it has proven itself for the past 1,000 years. Gold does not increase too quickly but is extremely stable and always ensures the value of our assets whenever the world is unstable.
Have you ever seen gold dumped 50-70% in the event of war, inflation, recession? But that happens regularly with bitcoin, an asset that is still considered high risk.

Bitcoin is the choice of those who are willing to take risks for high returns while gold will be the choice of those who are already rich and need a safe haven.

There are pros and cons when it comes to this aspect. Now, it is up to the investor how he gauge his chances here. But if possible, you can always invest in both to gain the benefits on these 2.
For most non-crypto users, definitely, they will go for gold. But for people here, they will surely include btc in their investment portfolio.
Getting the benefits of both assets will be a good thing. Besides, you are mostly likely considering other type of assets or already have other assets, if you can afford to.

It is not proper to compare these two assets because they are different from each other.
Of course, I know that gold market cap is 14x that of bitcoin, but gold have been in existence for a long period of time, and if bitcoin can be able to survive that long, the market cap will be bigger than that of gold. Bitcoin is still very young, and we can see how much profit it is giving to investors which is bigger than that of gold, and this is the reason why more people will continue adopting bitcoin overtime boosting its market cap.

What you say is just the thoughts and wishes of bitcoin investors, we still cannot know what will happen in the future and affirm anything. Looking at bitcoin's market cap at just over $1 trillion while gold is over $17 trillion, that's a huge gap and I think it will be very difficult for bitcoin to reach, let alone surpass.

To put it bluntly, gold is an asset that has been around for thousands of years, it has proven its strength through many wars, world economic collapses and still stands strong today. That is also the reason why it is always the top priority asset whenever economic instability occurs. Meanwhile, bitcoin is too young to be certain of anything, it is too volatile whenever the world is unstable, and it is not even globally legal yet. So it's too early to say it will surpass gold.

It's really simple in my mind. Best money always wins based on its properties, and specifically, based on the amount that is brought into circulation periodically. Gold took the best money throne, because it was the least inflationary, comparably to other metals, while inheriting the good properties, such as divisibility and durability.

Bitcoin will take the best money throne because it is completely resistant to supply changes. It's a matter of time before it surpasses gold in terms of market cap.

Apart from being inverse to Dollar I dont see why its a definite need to compare the two especially.   We dont compare BTC to oil especially or many other commodities.  It would be like relating car use and cost to riding a bike, not massively unreasonable but these two things are always intended to do different things and its clear they will always have their own advantages and disadvantages.

My very general take is this is peak dollar, we're at the top of FIAT currency dominating the world and how biased we are to politics instead of trade and business instead.   I do expect Dollar to decline as it becomes more obvious in its faults and unfit for use, Im not sure we are close exactly and I dont want to say there is some epic default event.   Yen should fail first, its lit red in even more ways yet Japan is a great country also so who knows how it turns exactly.

Bitcoin is Gold and more.
It's still Young it wouldn't be in parity but surpass the Marketcap of Gold.
Many are just getting to know about it and understand it's importance as a store of value and hedge towards inflation (gold).
Not to mention capacity and needs it can satisfy that Gold can't.

I have been reading a lot of posts in various threads and noticed many people can't imagine that bitcoin could be on its way to market cap parity with gold.

I thought I should take the time and have a look at some numbers and graphs in order to see what direction bitcoin is going and at what pace. I would also like to address those who can't let go of the idea that some shit coin could take over, crushing bitcoin dominance. That is why I begin my little presentation here with a graph about bitcoin dominance.



Everyone knows where the first significant decline in dominance came from. It was the shit coin craze in 2017 when bitcoin's market cap got considerably diluted while at the same time this led to many people in the space learning their first lesson. While 99(.99)% of the shit coins never recovered, bitcoin was just getting started. I remember people hoping for ethereum to take #1 and I think it was kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy that it was climbing in value so fast and so much because so many people thought the time has come, bitcoin is going to be dethroned. But I believe that some very smart and now even wealthier guys knew when to pull the plug. The closest that ethereum got to bitcoin was in June 2017.



And today.



I am not against coins other than bitcoin per se and everyone should invest as they please, but - and I admit it took me some time - I agree that bitcoin is the one to focus on. There might be use cases that are better served by some other coin, but bitcoin is the marker to monitor and understand how healthy or unhealthy, how promising or hopeless the overall state of the sector is.

Bitcoin's dominance today compared to earlier periods is interesting because it vastly recovered its dominance while being close to the ATH. This means proportionally significantly more money was invested in bitcoin despite rapidly rising prices, i.e. because of rapidly rising prices. Usually, bitcoin has a hard time keeping its dominance through bull market times as other coins often rise faster during good times and either or drop faster during bad times. Those who have their doubts, think about that. There are some folks claiming that smart money would leave bitcoin. There are other statistics that tell the opposite, but I leave that for another topic.

The following chart is displaying the gold-bitcoin correlation and provides an impression of how to understand the contemporary price development of the two asset classes.



It is charts like these why I understand that some folks can't grasp with ease why some people are very optimistic about bitcoin's price potential. The chart is designed such that both price scales fit in, correlation can be derived and the average user gets a first idea about correlation/ratios. But what you can't really see is the pace at which bitcoin caught up to gold. It's because bitcoin starts literally at zero and it is impossible to properly depict via the distances between the two graphs how mind-blowing bitcoin's growth has been. Ultimately, the graphs serve correlation calculation and only some number crunching helps to retrieve some further insights from the chart.

I have prepared a quick overview with excel. There are a few things I need to mention beforehand.

- I have taken all numbers from around July 20th for each year, give or take -2/+2 days.
- This means that I can miss ATHs and ATLs on a yearly basis. (Example: 2017, 2021, 2023)
- I have rounded where it made things easier, but without essentially skewing the result.
- I have taken the current bitcoin price and did not standardize it by adjusting current market cap by total supply
- I have standardized gold ounces: here it says that there are 208,874 metric tonnes. This translates into 7.336 billion ounces. I rounded it to 7.0 billion ounces and divided the price per ounce by 3, which provides the price per ounce assuming that instead of 7.0 billion ounces, there are now 21 billion ounces in order to match the current market cap of gold.
- I then took the unit mBTC instead of BTC. As mentioned above, I assume total circulating supply, which equals 21 billion mBTC. This led me to the calculation of the following table.



I used numbers and letters for the rows and columns because I thought it makes discussion here easier. If someone wants to point out a specific data point, please use the format letter;number.
I used some color below the table as I wanted to group some of the years. But as I said before, it isn't perfect as I neglected some of the yearly ATHs and ATLs, which would have had an impact as I didn't take yearly price averages, but specific price points. Though I did use the same time give or take and this provides us with some insight into the pace at which bitcoin developed.

In July 2010 the price of 1 mBTC was $0.00007 because the price of BTC was $0.07 divided by 1,000. To match the price of 1 ounce of gold, the required multiplier per mBTC was 5,661,904. In 2011, 1 mBTC matched 1 ounce at a multiplier of 38,880.

This is a huge jump and I think it is safe to say that most of this progress was due to geeks speculating like crazy (but still for a reason...). It stays around that until July 2012 although the bitcoin roller coaster never stood still. Who would have thought that 1 mBTC would ever cross $1, let alone $0.10?

In July 2013 the multiplier for 1 mBTC to match 1 ounce of gold dropped to 4,977. In July 2014 it dropped to 715.54. Now bitcoin went through a time of back and forth until 2016. In 2017, 1 mBTC crossed the $1 mark and the multiplier dropped to 162.62. This is the year where you can see that July price was far below that year ATH and the multiplier would have already been considerable lower. In 2018 it dropped to 50.24. Some back and forth until 2020.

In 2021 the multiplier drops to 18.45. In other words, 18.45 mBTC equal 1 ounce of gold. In 11 years, 1 mBTC dropped its multiplier to match 1 ounce of gold from 5,661,904 to 18.45. But this is not the end point yet as I haven't yet had the pleasure to coincidentally pick a price point close to the ATH. Since the peak is now holding for a longer period of time, the price per 1 mBTC close to its ATH now comes into play and reduces the required multiplier to 11.89 in July 2024.

1 ounce of gold is 11.89 times more valuable than 1 mBTC. If hypothetically 1 mBTC were to reach 933.33 and 1 ounce of gold is at $2800, parity would be reached. This also means that at parity (all things equal), bitoin (BTC) would have to increase by $33,000 to match a $100 increase in gold in order to maintain parity. More gold could be found, numbers might be off somewhat, you name it.

One of the most impressive observations here is that when 1 ounce of gold went from $1,189 in July 2010 to $2,388 in 2024, 1 mBTC reduced the required multiplier to match one ounce of gold from 5,661,904 to 11.89.

Private financial assets globally are estimated to be somewhere around $470 trillion. This is an important detail to know because many people think that gold as an asset class is so huge overall that it either has to shrink in order to allow bitcoin to grow, or bitcoin could never reach parity because there is not enough value in the world that could flow into the network. But rest assured, global bank deposits are on the decline and are shifted into securities and other financial assets like real estate and bitcoin. But there are still trillions threatened by devaluation and with time passing by, more and more people will be looking for alternatives and take the time to understand those alternatives. Bitcoin is one of them.

Whether money is being shifted from gold into bitcoin or not is a good question. I found some statements by banks saying that this is not the case, but keep in mind that banks would never undermine their own portfolio with implicit or explicit put or buy suggestions. But at the end of the day, my point is that gold money isn't needed in bitcoin in order for these two asset classes to reach parity. The pace at which 1 mBTC has fractionalized the required multiplier to match 1 ounce of gold is just mind-blowing.

With all the information out there, the need for borderless value mobility, verifiability and transparency, censorship-resistance, protection against inflation and so on and so forth, I can't see any plausible reasons as of yet why this magnificent chase for parity should come to an end anytime soon.