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The “Gold vs. BTC” Debate is Pure Fluff

December 16, 2024

VON GREYERZ partner Matthew Piepenburg joins Liberty & Finance’s Elijah Johnson for a plain-spoken examination of the headline-making BTC price rise.

Piepenburg rolls up his sleeves with a blunt assessment of BTC’s so-called “digital gold” slogan, which, based on the very definitional elements of money and the mathematical elements of volatility, clearly makes BTC neither a store of value nor a medium of exchange. Piepenburg makes no direct criticism of BTC as the speculative asset of an era, but the crypto in no real way resembles the characteristics and uses of physical gold nor an anti-fiat money alternative.

In short, BTC is many things, good and bad, to many investors, but it is ultimately an extreme speculation rather than a wealth preservation asset, and as such, the so-called “Gold vs. BTC” debate is no debate at all.

Piepenburg further unpacks the increased centralization and politization of BTC’s otherwise lauded “decentralized” and “apolitical” profile. In fact, Piepenburg suggests that BTC is becoming increasingly politicized as a clever entry drug to stable coin exploitation as a desperate way of mopping up otherwise unwanted US Treasury bonds.

VonGreyerz.gold

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Matt began his finance career as a transactional attorney before launching his first hedge fund during the NASDAQ bubble of 1999-2001

Thereafter, he began investing his own and other HNW family funds into alternative investment vehicles while operating as a General Counsel, CIO and later Managing Director of a single and multi-family office. Matthew worked closely as well with Morgan Stanley’s hedge fund platform in building a multi-strat/multi-manager fund to better manage risk in a market backdrop of extreme central bank intervention/support. The conviction that precious metals provides the most reliable and longer-term protection against potential systemic risk led Matt to join VON GREYERZ.

The author of the Amazon No#1 Release, Rigged to Fail, Matt is fluent in French, German and English; he is a graduate of Brown (BA), Harvard (MA) and the University of Michigan (JD). His widely respected reports on macro conditions and the changing behaviour of risk assets are published regularly at SignalsMatter.com.