The $5,000 Moment
Gold just broke $5,000 an ounce.
Take that in. The yellow metal that your grandfather bought, that central banks have hoarded for centuries, that every financial advisor calls “the ultimate safe haven” is having its moment. And what a moment it is.
Since Trump’s inauguration, gold is up roughly 90%. Central banks are buying at a pace we’ve never seen: 60 tonnes per month, compared to the 17-tonne average before 2022. Goldman Sachs just raised their 2026 target to $5,400. Some analysts are calling for $6,400 peaks. The gold bugs are taking victory laps, and honestly? They’ve earned it.
Look at the backdrop. Geopolitical tensions are mounting across multiple fronts, from Iran to Greenland to Venezuela. The Fed remains caught between competing pressures with no clear path forward. The dollar is losing credibility, with the DXY sitting at a 4-month low. In this environment, the flight toward tangible assets makes complete sense.
So if you’re a gold holder reading this, I’m not here to rain on your parade. Gold is doing exactly what gold is supposed to do. It’s being the anchor in a storm.
But I want to show you something.
Right now, the world is scrambling for hard assets. Faith in fiat is cracking at the seams. This isn’t a defeat for Bitcoin. It’s actually the clearest signal yet that Bitcoin is the better long-term trade.
Let me explain.
Giving Gold Its Due
Before I make the case for Bitcoin, let me be clear about something: gold works. It has worked for a very long time. And if you’re holding it right now, you’re probably feeling pretty vindicated.
Five thousand years of history is not nothing. When economists talk about the Lindy effect, the idea that the longer something has survived, the longer it’s likely to continue surviving, gold is the ultimate example. Empires rise and fall. Currencies come and go. The Roman denarius, the British pound sterling, the Dutch guilder, the US dollar’s gold standard: all of them eventually debased or abandoned. Gold remains. It was money before writing existed, and it’s still money today.
There’s a reason for that staying power. Gold has a unique combination of properties that make it naturally suited to store value. It’s scarce. It’s malleable enough to coin and divide, but durable enough to last millennia. It doesn’t corrode, doesn’t rust, doesn’t decay. A gold bar buried by a Roman soldier could be dug up today and sold for market price. Try that with any other asset class.
And it’s not just retail investors or doomsday preppers who believe in gold’s enduring value. Central banks, the very institutions that create fiat money out of thin air, are stacking gold like never before.
A recent survey found that 95% of central banks plan to increase their gold reserves in 2026. Think about what that means. The people who run the printing presses, who have every incentive to maintain faith in paper currency, are quietly accumulating the one asset that exposes paper currency as a confidence game. These are not unsophisticated actors. They see what’s coming, even if they can’t say it publicly.
Gold offers something genuinely valuable in an age of financial complexity: no counterparty risk. When you hold physical gold in your possession, you don’t need to trust a bank to remain solvent. You don’t need to trust a government to honor its obligations. You don’t need to trust a protocol to function as designed. There’s no terms of service, no fine print, no conditions. It’s tangible. It’s universally recognized from New York to New Delhi to Nairobi. It just sits there, being gold, asking nothing of you except secure storage.
In a world where financial instruments have become impossibly convoluted, where derivatives are stacked on derivatives and nobody quite knows where the risk lies, there’s something deeply reassuring about an asset you can hold in your hand. You can understand gold. Your grandmother can understand gold. That simplicity has value.
And the recent performance speaks for itself. Gold is up 65% in 2025. Bitcoin is basically flat, maybe slightly down depending on when you check. During the recent geopolitical flare-ups, gold rose 8.6% while Bitcoin fell 6.6%. When missiles started flying, money flowed into gold and out of Bitcoin. The “digital gold” narrative that Bitcoiners have pushed for years has taken a real beating, and there’s no point pretending otherwise.
The market has spoken, at least in the short term. When fear spikes, investors still reach for the ancient hedge, not the digital one. Gold is doing its job. It’s being the safe haven it has always been.
But here’s where I want to push back, gently.
The question isn’t whether gold works. Clearly it does. The question is whether gold’s limitations, the very things that make it tangible and trustworthy, will become liabilities when the next crisis hits. Because the nature of crises is changing. And gold, for all its timeless virtues, was designed for a different world.
What Gold Can’t Do
Let me tell you about Nicolás Maduro’s gold problem.
For years, Venezuela’s authoritarian leader kept a significant portion of his country’s wealth in gold. It seemed like the smart play. Gold is neutral, right? Gold doesn’t care about your politics. Gold can’t be frozen by American sanctions or seized by foreign courts. That’s the whole point.
Except it didn’t work out that way.
When Venezuela’s economy collapsed and Maduro became an international pariah, he discovered an uncomfortable truth: gold is only as good as your ability to access it. Venezuela had around 31 tonnes of gold stored in the Bank of England, worth nearly $2 billion at the time. When Maduro tried to withdraw it, the UK said no. Years of legal battles followed, bouncing between the High Court, the Court of Appeal, and the Supreme Court. The gold sat in London, technically Venezuela’s, practically untouchable. It remains frozen to this day, now worth somewhere between $3 and $5 billion depending on who’s counting.
Even the gold inside Venezuela wasn’t safe. Moving it became a nightmare. When Maduro tried to sell gold to Turkey and the UAE to keep his regime afloat, he had to physically transport it. That meant chartering planes from Turkish Airlines, Russian cargo carriers, and Emirati airlines. It meant manifests, intermediaries, flight paths that could be tracked, and pressure points where transactions could be blocked or seized. Between 2018 and 2019, Venezuela managed to move roughly $2 billion in gold this way, with around $900 million going to Turkey and over a billion to the UAE. But every shipment was a logistical ordeal, a diplomatic liability, and a potential target.
In the end, it wasn’t enough. In January of this year, US forces captured Maduro and transported him to New York, where he now faces trial on narco-terrorism charges. His gold reserves, scattered between frozen vaults in London and whatever remains in Caracas, couldn’t save him.
Now consider Iran. Facing the threat of complete disconnection from the dollar-based financial system, Iranian officials have taken a different approach. According to blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, Iran’s central bank quietly accumulated over $507 million in Tether’s USDT stablecoin throughout 2025. A nation-state, under existential economic pressure, decided that digital tokens were more accessible than gold bars in a vault. They made the wrong choice, in my view. Stablecoins are still dollar-denominated, still traceable on the blockchain, and Tether has already frozen tens of millions in Iranian-linked wallets at the request of authorities. But the impulse was correct. They understood that physical assets have become liabilities when powerful adversaries can seize anything they can reach.
This is what gold bugs don’t like to talk about. Gold’s greatest strength, its physicality, is increasingly becoming its greatest weakness.
After Russia invaded Ukraine, the West froze roughly $300 billion in Russian central bank reserves held abroad. Just like that. No trial, no due process. The bulk of it sits in Euroclear, a Belgian securities clearinghouse, frozen indefinitely. This was the eleventh largest economy in the world, a nuclear power, a permanent member of the UN Security Council. If their reserves could be frozen, anyone’s can.
Central banks noticed. That’s why gold purchases have exploded since 2022. The message was clear: hold your reserves in Western currencies, and you hold them at the pleasure of Western governments. Gold seemed like the answer. Bring it home, stack it in your own vaults, and nobody can touch it.
But even this has limits. Gold requires custody, which can be targeted. It requires personnel, who can be bribed or coerced. It requires transportation if you ever want to move it, and that transportation passes through physical space controlled by governments. Borders are weaponized. Surveillance makes moving value across jurisdictions harder than ever.
Here’s the distinction I want you to hold in your mind:
Gold is a hedge against inflation. It protects your purchasing power when central banks debase their currencies.
Bitcoin is a hedge against both inflation and confiscation. It does everything gold does, while also protecting your ability to access and control your wealth when powerful actors want to take it from you.
In the world that’s emerging, the second problem may matter more than the first. And only one of these assets solves for both.
Why Bitcoin Is Real and Gold Is... Also Real
There’s a common critique of Bitcoin that goes something like this: “It’s not real. It’s just numbers on a screen. You can’t hold it in your hand.”
I understand the intuition. We’re physical creatures living in a physical world. There’s something deeply satisfying about holding a gold coin, feeling its weight, knowing that this object has been valued by humans for millennia. Gold feels real in a way that a string of letters and numbers does not.
But this critique misunderstands what makes something economically real. And it misunderstands why gold itself has value.
Gold isn’t valuable because it’s shiny. It’s valuable because it’s costly to produce. Every ounce of gold that exists represents an enormous expenditure of energy, labor, and capital. You have to find it, dig it out of the ground, refine it, transport it, secure it. This cost is what makes gold scarce, and scarcity is what makes it useful as money. You can’t just wish gold into existence. You can’t print it. You can’t fake it without spending nearly as much as the real thing would cost.
Economists call this “unforgeable costliness.” It’s the property that separates real money from arbitrary tokens. Throughout history, the monies that lasted were the ones that were hardest to produce. The ones that failed were the ones that could be manufactured cheaply, debased easily, or counterfeited without consequence.
Bitcoin has this property. In fact, it has it more reliably than gold.
Every Bitcoin that exists represents a massive expenditure of computational energy. The mining process is designed to be expensive, and that expense is what secures the network and makes the currency trustworthy. You can’t fake a Bitcoin. You can’t counterfeit the blockchain. You can’t print more of it because you control the government or discovered a new mine. The supply schedule is fixed, transparent, and enforced by mathematics rather than politics.
In a world drowning in digital fakes, where AI can generate photorealistic images and deepfakes can put words in anyone’s mouth, this matters more than ever. Cost creates truth. Weight, in the economic sense, creates trust. Both gold and Bitcoin are heavy in this way. Both are anchored to reality by the energy required to produce them.
But Bitcoin has an additional property that gold doesn’t: it’s information.
A gold bar is a physical object that exists in a specific location. It can be seen, tracked, seized, and stolen. Moving it requires trucks, planes, armed guards, and paperwork. Crossing a border with significant gold holdings means dealing with customs, declarations, and the ever-present risk of confiscation.
Bitcoin is different. Your entire net worth can be encoded in a sequence of words that you memorize. You can cross any border on earth with nothing but your brain, carrying wealth that no guard can find and no scanner can detect. There’s no vault to raid if the vault is in your head. No safe deposit box to freeze. No account to sanction.
This isn’t a theoretical advantage. It’s a lifeline for people living under regimes that confiscate wealth, for refugees fleeing war zones, for dissidents targeted by their governments, for anyone who has ever wondered what they would do if they had to leave everything behind.
Gold is heavy in the physical world. Bitcoin is heavy in the informational world.
In 2026, which world matters more?
10 Years, Not 10 Days
If you’ve been following financial news this year, you’d be forgiven for thinking Bitcoin has failed as a store of value. Gold is up 65% in 2025. Bitcoin is basically flat. During recent geopolitical flare-ups, gold rose while Bitcoin fell. The “digital gold” narrative looks like it’s in trouble.
But narratives depend entirely on the timeframe you choose.
Zoom out to ten years, and the picture inverts completely. Bitcoin hasn’t just outperformed gold over the past decade. It has obliterated it. We’re talking orders of magnitude, not percentage points. When gold bugs point to 2025 as evidence that Bitcoin has failed, they’re measuring a marathon by a single mile.
The difference comes down to how you think about time. Gold investors measure in months and quarters. Bitcoiners measure in halving cycles. Every four years, the rate at which new Bitcoin enters circulation gets cut in half, creating a rhythmic pattern of accumulation, appreciation, correction, and consolidation. If you zoom in on any single phase, you can tell almost any story you want. Catch it across multiple full cycles and you see one of the most consistent long-term appreciation trends in financial history.
We’re currently in a consolidation phase. Bitcoin hit an all-time high above $126,000 in October 2025 and has since pulled back to around $88,000. The tourists who bought because their cousin told them it was going to $500,000 by Christmas have mostly sold and moved on. What’s left is a base of holders who understand the thesis, who measure their holdings in Bitcoin rather than dollars, and who view dips as accumulation opportunities.
Meanwhile, something else is happening that doesn’t show up in day-to-day price charts. Sovereign wealth funds are quietly building positions. Corporate treasuries are adding Bitcoin to their balance sheets. The infrastructure for institutional adoption has matured dramatically. The plumbing is being laid for the next wave of capital.
When everyone is running to gold, it means they’re scared. And when they’re scared, they’re not yet ready for Bitcoin. They’re reaching for the asset their grandparents trusted because it feels safe and familiar. That’s not a criticism. It’s human nature. But it’s also a signal.
Fear is when you buy Bitcoin, not when you sell it.
Gold is the answer to a question people have been asking for five thousand years. Bitcoin is the answer to a question most people haven’t even learned to ask yet.
Why Gold’s Victory Is Bitcoin’s Setup
Here’s the most contrarian thing I’ll say in this piece: gold’s rise is bullish for Bitcoin.
I know that sounds like cope. Bitcoin is flat, gold is ripping, and I’m trying to spin it as good news. But hear me out, because I think this is the most important point in the entire article.
What does it mean when gold breaks $5,000? It means the world is losing faith in the dollar. It means investors, institutions, and central banks are actively seeking alternatives to the fiat monetary system. It means the question “where do I put my wealth if I don’t trust governments?” is being asked more urgently and by more people than at any point in recent memory.
Gold is the first answer most people reach for. It’s familiar. It’s safe. It’s what your parents told you to buy when things get scary. And that’s fine. Gold has earned that trust over millennia.
But every dollar that flows into gold is a dollar that’s asking a deeper question, even if the person spending it doesn’t realize it yet. The question is: what comes next? If you’ve accepted that you need an asset outside the fiat system, you’ve already taken the first step. The second step is realizing that you might also need an asset outside the physical world.
Central banks can’t buy Bitcoin yet. The regulatory frameworks aren’t there. The political cover doesn’t exist. So they buy gold, because gold is what central banks have always bought. But their citizens don’t have the same constraints. A person in Turkey watching the lira collapse can buy Bitcoin tonight. A family in Argentina trying to preserve their savings doesn’t need permission from the IMF. A tech worker in Nigeria or Vietnam or Brazil can download a wallet and opt out of their local monetary system in minutes.
Consider what happened with Iran. When they needed to move value outside the reach of sanctions, they bought $507 million in stablecoins. They made the wrong bet, choosing Tether instead of Bitcoin, but they demonstrated something important: when nation-states face existential financial pressure, they reach for digital solutions. They don’t try to airlift gold bars. They go online.
The same pattern is playing out at every level. When Poland stacks gold, they’re one step away from asking about Bitcoin. When the UAE processes Venezuelan gold shipments, they’re learning the limitations of physical settlement. When wealthy families in unstable countries look for ways to protect their assets, they start with gold and end up researching multisig wallets and seed phrases.
Gold is the gateway. Once you accept that you need non-sovereign money, the logical endpoint is the asset that’s also non-physical. The asset that can’t be frozen in a vault in London or seized at a border crossing. The asset that exists everywhere and nowhere, secured by mathematics instead of guards.
This is why I’m not worried about gold’s outperformance this year. Gold winning means the thesis is working. People are waking up to the need for hard money. They’re just not all the way there yet.
Some of them will get there. And when they do, they’ll find Bitcoin waiting.