➡ The speaker argues that gold and Bitcoin are not competitors, but different tools for different times. He suggests that gold’s recent outperformance doesn’t mean Bitcoin is less valuable, but that we’re in a cycle where trust in traditional systems is low, making gold more appealing. He also emphasizes that Bitcoin was designed to eliminate the need for trust, which could be crucial in the future. The speaker believes that understanding the core principles of these assets can help predict their future performance.
➡ The text discusses the evolution of trade and the limitations of traditional forms of money like gold, which are not easily divisible or portable. It highlights the slow transaction and settlement times of traditional systems, which are not compatible with the speed of modern trade. The text then introduces Bitcoin as a potential solution, being a neutral, easily transferable asset that can be traded at the speed of the internet. However, it acknowledges that Bitcoin is still in its early stages of evolution and needs time to become a widely accepted medium of exchange and unit of account.
➡ The article discusses the need for a constant measure in economics, highlighting the fluctuating nature of commodities like oil and gold. It suggests Bitcoin, designed to be neutral and trustless, as a potential solution. The author believes Bitcoin could become a unit of account by 2050, providing a neutral settlement layer and reserve asset for the world. He encourages readers to consider the long-term evolution of money and not to focus solely on short-term changes.

Gold, it beat Bitcoin. Now, after one of the strongest runs we’ve seen in the years, gold outperformed. And a lot of investors think that confirms something. That gold is a safer bet. That Bitcoin is just volatility. That the cycle shifted. And that sounds obvious at first. But when I looked at the gold Bitcoin chart, I didn’t see confirmation. What I saw was a signal hidden inside of there. Now, if you misread the signal, you’re going to position yourself wrong for what’s coming next. A few weeks ago, I was invited to speak at one of the largest gold mining conferences in the world.

It was my fourth year in a row. The last three years, Bitcoin had clearly outperformed gold. That was great. But this year, that flipped. Now, instead of debating who was winning, I broke down why the scoreboard itself might be the wrong frame entirely. So what you’re about to watch right now is that keynote. And by the end of this video, you’re going to look at gold and Bitcoin in a completely different frame. So let’s go. What I want to do is I want to take us through a little bit of history and break things down to a first principles level so we can understand the mechanism underneath it all so you can all start to build and formulate your own ideas on top of that.

And if you can understand it from this core basic principle, then maybe it can help you start to understand the future a little bit. In the finance world, in the investing world, we say that past performance is no guarantee of future performance. And just because something has been that way doesn’t mean it will always continue to be that way. And this is not this time is different. But it is that maybe if I understand things from their core, things can change. So gold is, was the best neutral reserve asset that humanity has ever seen.

It’s undisputable. 5000 years of history proves that to us. However, I believe that Bitcoin is the first one that was designed specifically so humanity doesn’t ever have to trust anything. This is not about replacing gold. This is not about what’s better. It’s about how the world could move forward. Okay, so we want to understand the root cause. If we break this down to first principles level at the at the beginning, the problem is not about governments printing too much money. It’s not about CPI inflation going up. It’s about trust. Money was created to solve the trust problem.

Maybe before even money, the first form of money was actually credit where I knew my neighbor and I would gladly give him something and I know that he would pay me back later. The problem is that I can only so I can only know so many people. So we created money to solve the trust problem from day one. I don’t know you. I don’t know if you’re going to pay me back. I don’t trust you. No offense. But I’ll gladly give you the goods if you give me some form of money. We’re going to go through what that means.

But what we’re seeing today with inflation is not about inflation itself. It’s a byproduct of the trust. And the trust gets continued to be eroded over a period of time. Today, we see that money’s being weaponized. We see tariffs being thrown across left and right. We see sanctions being used left and right. They’re becoming like a blunt tool. Trump is now using them to bludgeon everybody with the threat of weaponization of dollars. And so when that happens, people have to start thinking about other options. And so we see that there’s a global trust breakdown.

And I believe that’s what’s going to create the next era of monetary evolution. I’m going to break that down for you. Now, before we go into this, I want to address the elephant in the room here. Bitcoin’s price is down. Gold has done amazing. This is my fourth year in a row. I’ve been at this conference. And every year, Bitcoin has been higher and higher and higher. And every year, I said, I told you so last year. And this year, all the gold bugs going to tell me, I told you so. Because Bitcoin is down and gold has outperformed it.

There’s no denying that. We know that sovereign accumulation is happening at a massive scale. Banks are adding more gold than any time in history. And they have been for the last couple of years. We see that maybe with all the risks that’s happening with the world, the threat of wars and tariffs and uncertainty and globalization, that maybe the risk on assets are starting to do better than the risk off assets. Maybe Bitcoin really is still a risk off asset. I can concede that. Maybe it’s the lag effect. But I do want to show you this chart here, because I think this chart proves my point.

And the point that I’m making is that this is not an inflation narrative. And I know that’s what you hear everywhere in the gold space. The governments are going to print lots of money, prices are going to go up for it. And so in order to protect yourself, go into gold because it’s a fixed store of value, and it will protect your purchasing power. I think that’s wrong. I think this chart shows us this. So what we saw was that from 2020 until 2024, when we saw the most amount of stimulus we’ve ever seen, 10 times more stimulus than we had ever seen in history, record high inflation, the highest we’ve seen in multiple decades, gold did nothing.

But I thought it was for inflation. So we print 10 times more money in history, we have record inflation and gold did nothing. Sort of breaks the inflation narrative. So then why is it going up now? True inflation says inflation is 1.2%. We have no inflation. We’re risking going into deflation right now. But yet look at gold like a hockey stick. So what is really going on? We want to understand this from a first principles level. It’s a safe haven, but not for inflation because of trust. Now this chart right here is Bitcoin’s secular uptrend.

So this is Bitcoin priced in gold. And I think this gives us a much different picture. What happens is when we measure everything in dollars, Canadian dollars, or whatever, our yardstick is like an elastic band, and it’s constantly being moved, it’s constantly being stretched, and we don’t really understand what’s going on. And so here I’ve put Bitcoin priced in gold, and we see something much different. What we see is, it’s cyclical. What we see is that there’s times where Bitcoin outperforms, and there’s times where gold outperforms. And that’s just the way it goes.

Now I would say, can I go back? I would say just real quick, if I can throw a jab, for this period where gold did nothing, Bitcoin went up 800%. So it’s cool that gold has now outperformed Bitcoin, what it would do, 70%, 80%. Okay, that’s cute. Back to this. So what we see is that gold catches up in times of bear markets. And so Bitcoin goes through these four-year cycles, and what we can see out of these green lines here is that every time we go into one of these four-year cycles, it catches back up to the 200 weekly moving average.

It’s cyclical. It doesn’t mean the thesis is over. It doesn’t mean that Bitcoin is dead. It doesn’t really mean much. It means that we’re in a cycle. But let me take you back to the beginning. And so as I said, money was created to solve the trust problem specifically. The Austrian school might tell you that it was created to solve the coincidence of once. That’s a different story. But money wasn’t invented. It actually emerged. And so what happened is, throughout thousands of years of history, you see that lots of things have been money, feathers, rocks, seashells, cowrie beads.

Gold emerged as the best form of money. It was selected to become the best form of money because it had the best attributes. What’s important to understand is how this evolutionary process works. This is a very key piece. Pay attention. So what happens is, whether it’s a feather, a rock, a seashell, or gold, it starts as a collectible. Oh, look at this shiny rock. It’s kind of cool. There’s a lot of cool feathers and rocks and seashells. Some collectibles, if they’re good enough, can become a store of value. They can evolve to step two, which is a store of value.

Not all of them. Some baseball cards become stores of value. Pokemon cards become stores of value. The wealthy store their wealth in lots of collectibles. Old cars, fine art, not all collectibles become stores of value. Some do. Then only if the collectible has the correct money attributes, then it could, not always, but it could evolve to the third stage, which is to become a medium exchange. In order to evolve from a store of value to a medium exchange, it has to have the right money attributes. Portable, durable, divisible, recognizable, fungible, saleable.

Gold had the best attributes. Bananas are terrible because they’re not durable. A cow is somewhat durable. It’s also divisible, but it’s not fungible. I want a ribeye. I don’t want the liver. A Mona Lisa is not divisible. Gold was. But it’s important to understand that because if it takes certain attributes to be the best form of money, then what other things do we have that could potentially solve that, but even have better attributes? Maybe they could be more portable, more divisible, more durable. We’ll take a look at that. So white gold one, again, it was scarce.

It was the most scarce asset, the most durable asset. Gold can sit under the ocean for hundreds of years and still be just perfectly fine. It’s divisible. It’s not very verifiable. Right now with gold to 5,000 an ounce, there’s lots of fake gold out there. It’s pretty hard to know if you get real gold or not. It’s neutral. Anybody can dig it out of the ground anywhere in the world. So it’s neutral. It’s not easy to transport. If you’re trying to escape North Korea swimming eight hours across to Hong Kong, you can’t really swim the gold bars in your pocket.

It’s not very portable, but that’s the problem. So what happened is for thousands of years, as gold was money, it worked really good in a barter economy. When I have the gold in my hand, everyone knows I have the gold in my hand. And when I give you the gold, everyone knows you have the gold. But when the world started to have trade over space, over distance, the transaction time started to speed up. But the problem is that gold was still too slow. So the transaction time sped up, but because I wanted to trade with people in different countries, different continents, the gold couldn’t keep up.

So what always happens is technology. Technology changes things. I’d like to tell you that candles were light for 5,000 years, but we don’t use candles for light anymore. Now, some parts of the country still do, they are the world still uses kerosene lamps, but technology changes things. And so we needed technology. We had a problem. The gold was too slow. We couldn’t trade over space. And so we created a new piece of technology in the 1500s. It was called the ledger, the ledger in double entry accounting. But it introduced a bug, a fatal bug into the system.

The fatal bug was trust. We had a trustless commodity, but now I had to give it to an institution. And I had to trust the institution wouldn’t manipulate that. Now, trade has continued to exceed or expand. It’s gotten faster and faster and faster. Today, we live on the internet. Today, we’re on Zoom. Today, we’re clicking a button, at least in America, I can click Amazon and have them in my house in the same day. The transaction time continues to get faster and faster and faster, but the settlement time is still from the 1500s.

If you’re a merchant and you accept credit cards and debit cards, you know, this takes three to five days to get money into your account. Three to five days? Are you kidding me? Worse than that, it takes six months for final settlement because they could reverse that transaction anytime they want. How are we still using 1500 technology in today’s day and age? I’m talking ahead of my slides. Here we go. The ledger moment, Florence Italy. Okay, I already talked past that one. So we use the ledger in order to have faster trade.

But the problem that today is we have instant networks today. We have digital speed today. Transactions execute at the speed of the internet, but gold final settlement still lags. And so today, with a loss of trust, we can go back to that. How do I know if China really has the gold they say they have? How do I know it’s not tungsten bars? How do I know that they’ll actually deliver it to me if I actually need it and want it? The rules of based order, according to Mark Carney at the West this week, says the rules of based order is over.

And Stephen Miller from the Trump administration said, might makes right. I’m a small little guy. They seize Russia’s money. Why would they give me the gold if they don’t want to? You can’t get past the trust bug. Now let’s break Bitcoin down into two different pieces here. We have Bitcoin and asset. And then we have Bitcoin and network. Bitcoin is the first, it’s a zero to one moment. It’s the creation of fire. It’s the first open source protocol. A protocol is a piece of software that nobody owns or controls. It’s just a software protocol, like the TCP IP protocol that everybody builds the internet on top of.

It’s the first open source software protocol for open neutral settlement. Then we have an asset on top of that, which is Bitcoin, the coin that trades across that. Now, as the world continues to find themselves with less and less trust, and sure, the bricks, they’re going to have a new currency, right? A goldback currency. They can’t even trust each other at the last meeting in South Africa. They were going to arrest Putin if he went to the meeting. Putin, from Russia, the R in bricks couldn’t go to the S in South Africa. But yeah, sure, they’re going to trust each other.

Sure. And even if they could, what, they’re going to once a month, put load up pallets of gold on a plane and ship it across the sea or put it onto airplanes? Does that sound real practical? I think we could all agree that the world needs, I believe the only way the world can continue to go forward globally trading with each other is to have some form of neutral settlement. Let’s just get Bitcoin out of the picture for a second. The world is going to need some way to have some neutral asset that could be traded at the speed of the internet neutrally.

So what’s that going to be? The dollars getting weaponized, it will continue to be stable coins are going to proliferate. It’s only going to increase the US government’s ability to censor transactions. Again, the bricks, they’re supposedly going to have their own currency, but they can’t even agree to not arrest each other if they show up in each other’s countries. China is working on a dual strategy right now. This is a serious competitor. They’ve opened up a parallel financial system where they’re using the RMB for liquidity and they’re settling in gold. They opened up swap lines with 32 countries.

It’s actively working right now. One of the reasons why I think gold is going so high, but at the end of the day, who’s going to trust China? They don’t even have open capital markets. Bitcoin follows the same path as gold, and this is where a lot of people go wrong, but why are central banks buying gold today and not Bitcoin? If what you’re saying is true, Mark, it’s because it’s an evolutionary process. You’re trying to think of step 50, but we’re on step four right now. Typically, what investors try to do is try to find an edge, an edge is I know something that most people haven’t figured out yet because once everybody knows it, the edge is gone.

We want to understand that it hasn’t failed. The reason why gold is still being bought is it has 5,000 years of history, but Bitcoin is on the same evolutionary path. It’s gone past the collectible. It was a collectible. It was cute. 2009, 10, 11, 12. It’s emerged. I think it’s fully gone into the store of value phase. It’s been the best performing asset for 17, 15, 12, 10, 9, 5, 3, 2 years, not the last year. The last two years, its average is 50% CAGR. The last three years, its average is 70% CAGR.

Eye watering, mind bending, so it’s clearly a store of value. It’s capable of being a medium exchange, but it hasn’t got to that level yet. In my opinion, from my research, I don’t have time to go into it. I believe it’ll be in that stage somewhere in the 2030 to 2040 range. You guys are gold guys. You know what Gresham’s law is? You know why you don’t want to spend a boom. If you were to receive a pre-65 quarter or dime, U.S. quarter or dime, would you spend it? No, why not? Because it’s worth more than the quarter or dime.

That’s why there’s none in circulation. Good money drives out bad. It’s why we spend fiat, but we’re going to save the Bitcoin. It will achieve the medium exchange eventually through the evolutionary process. Give it time. Now, if the evolutionary process holds, it could go from a store of value to a medium exchange. And eventually, if enough people use it as a medium exchange, it can become a unit of account. As I showed you in the Bitcoin price chart priced in gold, the absurdity of trying to measure assets with an elastic or stretchy measuring stick.

We don’t have asset bubbles right now. We have a bubble in the fiat currency that’s manipulating the prices and allowing and making it very difficult for us to understand what true value is. How can the world continue to measure assets with a measuring stick that’s always being changed? I believe it was Ludwig von Mises, the father of the Austrian school, said that in economics, there has never been a constant. So when we use commodity money, it changes all the time. The amount of oil changes all the time. The gold changes all the time.

There’s never been a constant. How are you going to build a house if you don’t have a constant measure? How can you coordinate a global economy without a constant measure? Now, gold was neutral by nature. Again, anybody can dig it out of the ground. Anywhere in the world is fungible. But Bitcoin was designed to be neutral by design. It was purpose built for this. And again, not today. Gold was the best reserve asset humanity has ever had. I believe Bitcoin is the first one humanity will never have to trust. It was built specifically for that.

And the key piece is here, it’s monetary evolution. And I don’t believe it’s gold versus Bitcoin. When it comes to building value into the world, it comes down to solving problems. So if you want to understand the world, understand what is the problem we’re trying to solve? What was the problem that money originally was created for? To solve trust. What’s the problem today? There’s no trust. The only way the world can continue moving forward when trading isn’t something that we can have trust. I believe Bitcoin is that it’s purpose built to be trustless.

This evolutionary path is playing out in real time. Don’t lose sight of the bigger picture and where we’re going based off of what’s happening in this quarter or this year. Because to me, the process is playing out perfectly as it’s supposed to in the perfect amount of time. I expect it to be a unit of account by the year 2050, not sooner. And so I’ll leave you with this. My time is up. The world needs a neutral settlement layer and a neutral reserve asset. Period. And if it’s not Bitcoin, then what? Alright, that’s a wrap on the keynote.

Hopefully you enjoyed that. Just seeing a peek of what it looks like on the stage. Now, hopefully you think differently about gold and Bitcoin. And I have price targets for both gold and Bitcoin going into 2030, 2040, and 2050. And if you want to see what those are, you should probably go watch that video right here. And I’ll see you over there. [tr:trw].

See more of Mark Moss on their Public Channel and the MPN Mark Moss channel.