“Do I think [bitcoin is] a durable mechanism that could take the place of gold to a large extent? Yeah, I do, because it’s so much more functional than passing a bar of gold around.”
So said Rick Rieder, BlackRock’s chief investment officer of fixed income with BlackRock having some $8 trillion in assets under management.
Just 10% of that would 3x bitcoin’s current market cap with Rieder being just the latest of a chorus claiming bitcoin now is the new gold.
“There seems to be an increasing demand to use bitcoin where gold used to be used to hedge dollar risk, inflation and other things,” Deutsche Bank’s research strategist Jim Reid said.
Before him Citibank called bitcoin new gold as well, claiming it will be worth one house.
People are ditching their gold for bitcoin now because gold has been a bit lackluster in its performance amid mass devaluation.
While bitcoin has somewhat quickly responded presumably primarily because it is extremely accessible relatively speaking.
As the whole bitcoin infrastructure had to start from zero, the latest and greatest was used to build the trading infrastructure across the globe.
While gold and stocks, which still rely on paper to a great extent for provable ownership, have a somewhat sclerotic, archaic, difficult to access, and gate-kept infrastructure.
So, the young especially, are not going to buy gold knowing most of it is held by banks which don’t give them loans to buy houses.
They gone buy bitcoin knowing much of it is held potentially even by their university friends who mined it.
Then there’s the fact bitcoin does gold’s job way better. It has an actual finite supply, unlike gold which can be discovered with the world’s largest gold reserve revealed just recently.
Bitcoin is extremely easy to transport to the point one can just memorize the seed phase. Retail gold investors on the other hand have to rely on intermediaries who may well be lying about how much gold they have in their custody.
Also, you can actually use bitcoin to pay for things. Maybe not a coffee, but buying a house with bitcoin would be pretty cool. Buying it with gold would be weird.
Then gold is just stuffy old grandpa stuff, belonging to fat bankers and their committees where they set the price in smoke filled rooms outside of prying eyes.
While bitcoin is cool open source code that you can mine in your house and where you can actually be your own bank.
Something you may well want to get practice in because Fed no longer cares about inflation or asset bubbles. Meaning we are now in a crack-up boom.
Image courtesy of Beeple
