Is Bitcoin Really "Digital Gold"?

I have nothing against Bitcoin. It’s a fascinating experiment, a volatile speculative asset and, for some, a lucrative trade. I do have a beef, however, with the Bitcoin maximalists, who’ve transformed a digital asset into a dogma and whose self-serving prophecies threaten to burn the unsophisticated investor.

It all started back in 2021 when I challenged Michael Saylor to a debate. The founder of MicroStrategy (now Strategy), a Bitcoin treasury company, Saylor seemed to be on every podcast and YouTube channel proclaiming that gold was worthless—a “barbarous relic,” as the maxis love to quote Keynes (who was actually talking about the gold standard)—and that Bitcoin was hurtling toward $1 million. (Saylor recently upped his price forecast to $13 million.)

I challenged him not on the blockchain technology or the virtues of decentralized finance, but on financial responsibility. My concern was that such zealotry, divorced from prudence, would lead people to make catastrophic decisions. It was Bitcoin evangelism, and the collection plate was being passed around with alarming fervor.

At the time, Saylor was advising people to sell everything, mortgage their houses, and go all-in on BTC. I mean, come on—mortgage your house? That’s not investment advice; it’s a recipe for financial ruin. When the rocket fizzles, the unsophisticated investor is left holding the bag.

Bitcoin is an asset class in a perpetual identity crisis. That’s why the narrative keeps pivoting to keep the hype alive. First, as a peer-to-peer currency, Bitcoin was going to revolutionize payments. But then as fees spiked and transactions slowed, suddenly it wasn’t about buying coffee anymore.

Next it was touted as a “store of value,” an inflation hedge superior to gold. When inflation took hold during the Biden administration, BTC plunged from $69k to $16k. Meanwhile, gold held steady and then began climbing.

Time for another pivot. Bitcoin became “digital gold,” a “safe haven asset” during crises. Except when economic turbulence hit in 2025, it went from $120k highs back to the $85–90k doldrums. It tanked like a high-flying tech stock, which it has a high correlation to. Meanwhile, gold was climbing to new all-time highs.

When gold broke to a new high above $4,400 in late 2025, a sudden “dump gold, pump Bitcoin” narrative flooded social media. The tactics were straight from the huckster’s handbook: recycling old clips of wild price predictions (“$250k in two months”), AI-generated deepfakes of people like Warren Buffett denigrating gold. Bitcoin maxis are the carnival barkers of the information age, selling tickets to a show that relies not on the product being hyped but on the audience’s credulity.

How, then, to promote Bitcoin to the masses? ETFs were supposed to unleash infinite demand. BlackRock and Fidelity launched spot ETFs; retail buyers piled in at the top—oops, that petered out. Inflows slowed, and BTC flatlined.

A government Bitcoin reserve to the rescue! Trump talked big about a Bitcoin reserve, but sorry, they only wanted “seized” Bitcoin from criminals—not exactly a ringing endorsement. Whatever happened to that U.S. Bitcoin reserve, anyway?

OK, how about more Bitcoin treasury companies like Saylor’s? Surely the nearly 100 new players would spark a buying wave. Sadly, it seems the market is discounting their brilliant strategy. Today they’re all trading below net asset value. Strategy’s holding $59 billion in BTC, but its market cap as I write this is only $46 billion.

Strategy and other Bitcoin treasury companies are also leveraged to the hilt, and an unraveling could force sales, tanking BTC further. It must feel like musical chairs among big buyers, each rich dude nervously looking over his shoulder like Humphrey Bogart in *The Treasure of the Sierra Madre*, wondering who’s going to exit first before the music stops.

And the latest marketing efforts? Fed rate cuts were going to inspire reflationary demand—except that inflation’s too stubborn, so no more rate cuts for the moment, or until Trump installs a friendly chair this coming May.

Bitcoin is an asset class desperately in search of a purpose, promoted not as a steady store of wealth but through appeals to greed and FOMO. “Buy now or miss the moon!” they urge investors, but as each attempt to gain new investors sputters—ETFs for retail, lobbying for government/state/Fed reserves, convincing corporates to dump dollars and treasury-up—the project gets harder to sell.

The endless campaigning by the maxis makes BTC look less like a popular DeFi movement than a pump scheme. Political contributions flow like Niagara Falls. Crypto PACs spend fortunes in elections, backing pro-BTC candidates to push for reserves and regulations.

And don’t get me started on media outlets like CNBC, supported by massive ad buys from the crypto industry, shilling for BTC via interviews with the likes of Saylor, Max Keiser, Tom Lee, and Jack Mallers, all of them “talking their book,” urging retail investors to buy the top. It reminds me of a scene from Wolf of Wall Street.If this were a regulated market, certain folks would now be in prison.

The part I find most amusing is the maxis’ favorite argument: “Bitcoin has outperformed every asset class, including gold, up thousands of percent since launch!” Sure, if you start from 2009, when it was nothing but a nerd experiment. That’s like measuring gold’s performance from when its only use was to adorn temples and Egyptian pharaohs.

Bitcoin wasn’t recognized as an emerging asset class until 2017, and the real turning point came in 2020–2021 when institutions, corporations, and governments started taking it seriously. Measure performance from that date and the story changes. Gold has risen steadily as a risk-off haven; BTC has been a rollercoaster.

Price predictions continue to circulate like chain emails. Saylor’s $150k by the end of 2025 (missed that one). His $13 million by 2045. Tom Lee’s $200k for 2025, the dips explained as “technical washouts.” Max Keiser’s annual $250k bombs, spun as “healthy resets” in crashes. Jack Mallers’ $1 million this cycle, blaming “liquidity air pockets” for the failure to get there.

So why the relentless push from government officials, CNBC, Fox, and billionaire whales to pump BTC and undermine gold, while the world is buying physical gold and dumping dollars? Why is the meteoric rise of gold and silver reported as bubbles or worse, a mere footnote on business pages that prefer to write about cryptocurrencies and tokens? And why have we heard no peep about the promised Fort Knox audit from Trump’s first term?

Because U.S. dollar supremacy is ending. Paper money unsupported by real assets will keep heading south as the world loses faith in the print-on-demand dollars, euros, and yen. Inflation will keep eating away at their value. Fiat is based on trust, and trust in fiat is in short supply these days.

BRICS countries are setting up alternate payment systems that bypass the dollar and euro entirely. A global financial reset is taking shape, and BTC may well have a place in it, but it’s way too early to tell. The truth is that from the earliest times, it’s he who holds the gold that makes the rules.

Now, I’m known as a gold guy. Guilty as charged. I started buying physical gold in 2001 when I realized the U.S. dollar was walking into an inescapable debt trap and was bound to lose value against gold. I’ve helped finance dozens of mining companies, and as I recount in my memoir *The Money Dilemma* (out later this year), my faith has paid off.

Is Bitcoin a similar store of value and hedge against failing fiat currencies? Maybe someday. Call me a cynic , but I have my own reasons to believe there is much risk in taking that chance as a store of my wealth, and I prefer to sleep at night. I would rather accumulate an asset that for the past decade has been quietly, and at times covertly, amassed by 120 of the world’s most powerful central banks and nations—an asset they mine, hold, and trade among themselves to sideline the dollar—than an asset being hyped by a cabal of billionaires and their media proxies.

Bitcoin is many things. It’s a reaction to the 2008 financial crisis. It’s a libertarian belief system wrapped in software, an ambitious attempt to create money that isn’t issued by the state. It’s an experiment to see whether code can substitute for governance. It’s a speculative asset fueled by a quasi-cultish belief.

Like gold, it’s rare, it’s mined, and it’s often hoarded. Have many investors made a fortune on Bitcoin? Absolutely. But is it digital gold? Not there yet, in my opinion.