Topic: When will Bitcoin catch up with Gold in capitalization? (Read 1126 times)

Yeah.. gold bugs, even though they tend to know about sound money, don't tend to really understand bitcoin... too bad for them.  The gold bugs that figure out bitcoin figure out that gold is fucked.. even though some of them (who learn about bitcoin) still might end up learning about bitcoin and still choosing to hold a certain gold allocation (perhaps more than they should), but little by little they also may well end up figuring out that bitcoin replaces gold as the most superior of monies ever known to man, including that if bitcoin happens to be 1,000x or more better than gold in terms of monetary properties, it still could take a bit of time for that to be reflected in the market, even though the writing is on the wall for anyone who spends some time figuring out the reality of bitcoin's superior value relative to gold that will continue to inspire the gravitation of value into bitcoin and out of gold..

Don't take it wrong, since it is not just good to look at gold, since bitcoin is taking the value from all monetized assets, since bitcoin is superior to all assets that are being used as monetary instruments/vehicles.. houses, equities, collectables and other places that normies tend to hold their value).


More correctly, bitcoin is in early adoption phases, so of course it is going to have a lot of unfair advantages over gold... if we might call it unfair or just call it reality.


Exactly.. .. bit coin might start to settle down a wee bit in the degree of its volatility when it gets more than 10x of gold's market cap.  So sure bitcoin will likely continue to be volatile, but it is likely to be more stable as it is progressing from 10x gold's market cap until it reaches 1,000x or more of gold's market cap.


Probably less than 1% of the world's population has any BTC, so it is very misleading when people try to act like bitcoin is anything even close to approaching a mature asset class.


I doubt it is a good idea to keep any more than 10% of the size of your holdings in gold as compared to what you have in bitcoin and probably even 10% is way too much, even though some people, institutions and governments are going to want to continue to cling onto their shiny metal rock... but it does not matter if they continue to cling onto an inferior  asset that is ongoingly going to get its lunch eaten, just like it has gotten eaten by BTC over the past nearly 13-ish years (I will let them have the first 3 years of bitcoin years as not counting towards price discovery)... we can start from 2012... .to help out gold's comparative numbers a bit.

Bitcoin is still in the hype phase. It isn't even mainstream yet. Although BTC has made substantial progress within just 15 years, there's a long road ahead before it becomes relatively stable. Stability can only be achieved once the market reaches a certain level of maturity. A considerable amount of the world's population hasn't bought or used BTC yet. Compared to traditional assets, Bitcoin is just getting started. It will continue to go up until a threshold is reached. Just like Gold.

I know for sure that BTC will surpass Gold's market cap. Especially when adoption is increasing at a fast pace. Let's give it 1-2 more decades to see what happens. Even if BTC surpasses Gold's market cap, that doesn't mean the "yellow metal's" days are over. Neither BTC can replace Gold or viceversa. Each will have their own uses/purpose in life. I'd suggest you hold both for complete peace of mind. You'll thank me later.

BTC is always there, in different cycles and different prices - and gold is there too when the instability comes.
They change each other in the minds of people respectively, and I think it's a behavior that is fine.
As you said - this forum would be inclined towards BTC and rightfully so.

That time will come in the decades ahead of us, in my opinion.
And it's simple - gold is when the instability comes, BTC - when there is no such thing, simple as that.

Bitcoin's market cap is still growing faster than gold because bitcoin's market cap is still quite small, but as bitcoin gets bigger, this growth rate will slow down. So catching up with gold's capitalization is not easy and may happen in the short term.
People often say that stable gold prices mean that gold prices do not increase too quickly, not that gold prices will stop increasing if the economy stabilizes.



Bitcoin and gold both have their own pros and cons, and both have different use cases, it is difficult to say that bitcoin is superior to gold in every way and vice versa. But since we are on the bitcoin forum it is understandable why bitcoin is biased and overrated  .

Don't you mean it will be easier for Bitcoin to catch up with Gold? After all, BTC's market cap went higher than Gold's within such a short amount of time. I know countries stockpiling Gold will increase its price. But only while wars and geopolitical tensions persist. Once it's over, Gold prices will settle. That's where Bitcoin comes in.

Many institutional investors (and a few governments) are already adding BTC to their portfolio. They consider Bitcoin as the next "digital Gold". With a predictable supply and portability, BTC is already superior to Gold. It just needs time for the world to recognize it. Who knows how valuable BTC will be once it's adopted by almost everyone in the world?

Even without war or economic instability, the demand for gold will continue to increase because most governments want to own as much gold as possible to secure their economies. Meanwhile, if bitcoin continues to be classified as a risky asset and not an option for governments. I don't think it can surpass gold's capitalization in the future.

While we are bitcoin investors and always want bitcoin to be the best asset, we need to accept the fact that gold is still the most sought after asset and the best asset in the world today. So I don't think we'll see bitcoin catch up or surpass gold anytime soon, at least not in this decade.

After ten months, gold market cap rise around 40% while Bitcoin market cap rise for 100%.

If this trend keep continue, it's hard for Bitcoin to catch up gold, although in the long run Bitcoin will.

The war in many countries still not yet ended and we've heard South Korea attempted martial law in the last week, if there are more countries join in war, gold price will keep rising.

I never viewed metals as an investment for future to myself, but i always saw it as a great way to save your cash and retain the value from when you bought it. It's not hard to turn it to liquid cash, and it beats letting inflation destroy your saving whereas bitcoin is accepted as a form of payment (also the stores of value) but just not widely yet. It's only 15 years old, these things take time. In another 15 years the amount of places accepting it as payment will likely be much greater.

I think you've meant "Bitcoin will surpass Gold". And yes, that is a possibility in the future considering that institutional investors are adopting it at a fast pace. All of the hype is on BTC right now. Not Gold. Although countries are slowly accumulating Gold, they're exploring adding BTC to their reserves. Discoveries of new deposits tells us Gold is not as scarce as we once thought it was. The more Gold is found, the less valuable it will become. At least, that's how I see it. I could be wrong, though.

You're right that Bitcoin is relatively new to the world compared to Gold. However, BTC has gained value at a faster rate than Gold (within just 15 years). Meanwhile, Gold has been around for centuries projecting slow and steady gains. It's relatively stable, but you won't earn much holding it long-term (unlike BTC). You'll be surprised how far Bitcoin will go in the future. This is just the beginning. Once BTC surpasses Gold in market cap, it would've truly gone mainstream. Just keep holding until that time comes. Cheers.

There's no denying it
We may not know when, but Bitcoin will surely surpass Bitcoin
One of the major reasons this will happen is because
Unlike GOLD, people can easily be able to see and track any transactions made with Bitcoin so the government can't lie about it(decentralized)

Although since gold has been in existence for centuries, it won't be an easy task compared to gold, Bitcoin is still very new to the market

Of course. Bitcoin is still new to the world. It's only 15 years old. Unlike Gold which has been around for centuries. With due time, BTC will be able to surpass Gold's market cap. Institutional investors are already showing huge interest in it. This year alone, Bitcoin had more gains than Gold itself. That's a fact that can't be denied. Developers will continue to introduce a series of network upgrades to make Bitcoin bigger and stronger than ever. All subject to the approval of community members.

With network hashrate growing each year, there's strong indication that Bitcoin will last a very long time. Probably a lifetime. Like I've said before, Gold will stop being a store of value as it turns into an industrial metal. It will only be used for jewelry and electronics, but not considered a serious long-term investment. Future generations will have this mindset. Just you wait and see.

I think the only thing bitcoin needs here is to be popular, it needs to be more widely accepted and become globally popular, only then will it have a chance to equal or even surpass gold's capitalization .

Overall, both assets have different use cases, bitcoin can be used as an asset or a means of payment .  Meanwhile, gold cannot be used as a means of payment but it is also a type of asset or jewelry and is widely used in most industries . Therefore, the demand for gold will not stop even if more gold is mined and the capitalization value of gold will continue to increase instead of standing still waiting for bitcoin to overtake it . Bitcoin is still far behind gold and I think it will take a long time for Bitcoin to catch up .

While Bitcoin recently reach above 100,00K and its achievement of over 10% of gold's market cap demonstrate impressive progress, to have equal market cap as gold at 850K will need much more. Bitcoin will need much broader adoption and significant technological improvements,  even maybe better than the Lightning Network.

While the value of gold is based on its physical and historic use, Bitcoin currently is more like digital utility and speculation. The higher the price of Bitcoin goes, the less it will be used as a payment system but more as a reserve asset. Whether this shift would be beneficial does depend on market dynamics and government regulation. All that being said, I believe in Bitcoin, and I hope that Bitcoin can finally reaching gold's market cap in few decades, with better global economic trends I think that's possible.

Bitcoin and Gold belong to different asset types and a comparison between them is like a comparison for fun and for impression. They're different in many specifications, not only in Portability.

The bullish case for Bitcoin is a good book, but the link is for an article on Medium, in which there are a table about Bitcoin, Gold, and Fiat in some specifications: Durable, Portable, Fungible, Verifiable, Divisible, Scarce, Established history, Censorship resistant.

Bitcoin is the best in that comparative table, but Gold has its strength in some specifications and you can choose Bitcoin or Gold depends on what specifications are your main concerns.

Bitcoin is portable, while Gold is not. This is one of the main advantages of holding BTC. You can carry millions of dollars' worth of BTC hidden in plain sight. It can be on a small piece of paper, a microSD card, a small usb drive, or even an implant. You can't do that with Gold. Between storage and transporation fees, carrying large amounts of Gold across the world becomes utterly-expensive and inconvenient. Besides, Bitcoin has a predictable/fixed supply. Everybody knows there will only be 21m BTC. But no one knows the exact amount of Gold in existence.

Last time I've checked, China discovered a large Gold deposit. Guess which one of the aformentioned assets is rarer? Bitcoin. I'm certain it will go higher than Gold (market cap) in the future. This is just the beginning. Who knows? Maybe Gold will end up being an industrial metal than a store of value. It'll be just like copper, and the others. Just buy and "hodl" more Bitcoin to become filthy rich in the long run.

The verifiability aspect is so much more important than some people understand I think. If a country is running on gold reserves as support of their fiat currency, nobody in the world can actually verify whether the gold they claim to have in storage is really there. Yes some people can get appointed and do an audit, but once you receive the audit, it is worth as much as the promise given by the government. Nobody can walk into the holy storage halls of a government and verify for themselves whether the gold is there not. But if we assume that some people could, it would still be uncertain for everyone who couldn't.

Now extend this idea of verifiability across boarders when it comes international currency trade and exchange rates. Nobody can ever know what they are trusting in. That is why countries buying currency reserves from other countries (like the Swiss Franc) mostly rely on what they can superficially see and assess. As Switzerland is mostly in the financial sector and has a sold economy, other governments buy Swiss Francs.

Bitcoin reserves and bitcoin price can be verified by everyone at every second from everywhere with the lowest key technical equipment. And if they can't do it themselves, someone in the neighborhood can do it for you without faking anything, so no trust involved. Just facts.

Bitcoin is highly liquid. The days will come when banks ask for financial solidity and will accept if someone holds bitcoin. People will be able to use it as collateral via smart contracts with banks. Would they rather take a piece of art or BTC? Of course BTC because it can be independently evaluated, is highly liquid and mobile, does not require third party trust like a notary because the blockchain can do the handling. It is all verifiable, contractual terms can't be changed retrospectively, and so on and so forth.

Verifiability is a big one!

People like to compare bitcoin and gold because bitcoin was largely designed around several of the premises of gold as sound money, yet bitcoin was designed in such a way to be even more sound money than gold with storage of value and peer to peer transaction, and bitcoin has both.  Surely, also bitcoin does not have the same kinds of third-party costs and obstacles as gold, and the fact of the matter is that many of us have likely come to understand that bitcoin is not only better than gold in a lot of aspects, and that bitcoin is likely in the ballpark of 1,000x or more better than gold in terms of various aspects of bitcoin's monetary qualities, so not only the scarcity of bitcoin, but also the verifiability, transportability, divisibility and the lack of dependency on third parties that end involving extra costs and even security issues. 

Surely there are aspects of financial sovereignty that can take place when there is authority over one's own money and value, and gold is not completely lacking in such qualities, since both gold and bitcoin are bearer instruments, but there still can be questions in regards to with whom any of us might be able to transact.

Currently, in terms of price, bitcoin is about 1/10th the market cap of gold, and so if it were to get to 1,000x gold's market cap, then that is about a 10,000x price adjustment with either bitcoin going up or gold coming down or both... and so getting to gold's parity in market cap could happen this cycle or it may take a bit of time, such as even another cycle or two (yet I have my doubts it would take a couple of cycles to reach mere parity with gold), and as others have said one thing is to reach bitcoin/gold parity, yet another thing is to sustain such parity... and then maybe getting to 10x higher than gold might not even be that difficult as compared with bitcoin potentially becoming way less volatile (relatively speaking) as compared to today when in the future bitcoin might be bouncing around and going from 10x of gold's market cap to 1,000x gold's market cap, which also could take 50-200 years to achieve.

There are likely going to continue to be battles along the way, since status quo rich probably do not appreciate their value being transferred into bitcoin, which has been happening in the past 10 years and is likely going to continue to happen at a considerably increasing rate.. the transfer of wealth from the no coiners to the coiners, and even ongoing and various confusions along the way in regards to figuring out what asset(s)/ currencies are more valuable, while at the same time people are figuring it out and are going to continue to figure out that bitcoin is the place to keep their value or to gravitate their own value into bitcoin in line with Gresham's law kinds of principles, even if most normies have no clue about what is Gresham's law, they still likely realize to spend their less valuable assets/currencies first.

Eith time it is quite likely that the value of gold and other monetized assets are going to flow (get sucked) into bitcoin, and right now the world has close to 1 quadrillion of monetized assets/currencies/commodities,^** and surely bitcoin would then have a current addressable market that is close to 1 quadrillion, since bitcoin is likely the most efficient, the best and the most sound of the monetary assets, so value is going to continue to flow into bitcoin, even though it could take 50-200 years for the fuller sense of monetization to flow into bitcoin.  

If we are referring to gradually and then suddenly, surely it can take some time for adoption and growth to continue to build and it might not even be very noticeable when the growth of bitcoin is going from its current state of less than 1% of the monetized world assets and then it gets to higher and higher levels of monetization.. since bitcoin is the most efficient and the strongest of the monetized assets/currencies, so people are going to realize that it is better to put value into bitcoin rather than other places that they had been keeping their value.

Bitcoin is not only gold 2.0.. but it is gold at about a 1,000x multiple.. people are catching on. and anyone still deluded into believing that bitcoin and gold are different or that they each have their own space or that there is some kind of a need to keep both, then sure they can have fun staying poor...It is not like I am wishing these kinds of conditions rather than just describing where the world is going in terms of bitcoin ongoingly eating gold's lunch and going to continue to eat gold's lunch, including eating the lunch of the various (multiple) other less efficient storage of value assets and monies.  If you are merely thinking about bitcoin/gold parity, then you are surely thinking small potatoes and don't even realize what bitcoin is...which is fine.. just go study it a bit more.. or buy/stack some in case it catches on.

**In 2021, Jesse Meyers had proclaimed that the total addressable market was $900 trillion, but I think that $1 quadrillion is easier to work with as a nice round number.  Here is a quote from a November 2021 Bitcoin magazine article and it has Luke Mikic's name, even though I think that the purported moon math comes from Jesse Meyers.. here it is:

>>>>"Moon Math: Bitcoin’s Total Addressable Market?
Let’s analyse just how easy it would be to send bitcoin on a meteoric rise that breaks all models. First, let’s ask ourselves: What is Bitcoin’s total addressable market (TAM)?
$12 trillion gold market
$250 trillion real estate market
$300 trillion global debt
$90 trillion global equity market
$100 trillion fiat
$100 trillion bond market ($18 trillion being negative yielding)
$1 quadrillion derivatives market
There's currently $900 trillion of total money and debt in the world when you ignore the derivatives market. Let’s move forward on the assumption that BTC is the next evolution of money and acts as a black hole that'll suck in all value (which it will), if we move onto a BTC standard."<<<<<<<

They are different products and I don't see the reason people always like comparing the two because gold is older than bitcoin and have been used for transaction even before bitcoin was invested so they see the reason why they should compare the two and if you want to even compare what investment people will choose when it comes to trust people will  definitely go for gold because they believe so much in gold just because gold have exited for long and it is usually a bar if not for the invention of the digital gold. and young people have chosen their own part which is bitcoin and just the way gold is accepted everywhere the same way that bitcoin is also accepted everywhere. they have similarities. I know majority of young people don't have business with gold and I am very sure that older people still prefer to invest in gold than in bitcoin all is because of the understanding they have.

Gold might become outdated in the future. Especially if the world transitions into the digital realm. Gold will be seen as a utility metal than a store of value. Just like what's been happening to Silver these days. Bitcoin will eventually surpass Gold's market cap due to the many benefits it provides. Besides scarcity, Bitcoin is portable, decentralized, and much harder (if not impossible) to confiscate. "Wall Street" is already heavily-invested in BTC.

With BlackRock's CEO Larry Fink showing huge interest in BTC ETFs, demand for Gold will diminish over time. Just you wait and see. There's no denying that spot BTC ETFs are better-performing than Gold ETFs. Would you imagine governments backing their currencies with BTC? It would be completely mind-blowing.