Central banks aren’t buying it. Billionaire investor Ray Dalio doesn’t trust it as a safe haven. And Bitcoin is trading 44% below its October peak while gold sits near all-time highs.
A Different Way To Run The NumbersMost people who shoot down the $1 million forecast do so by pointing out what it would take for Bitcoin to swallow up half of gold’s current market value.
Matt Hougan says that’s the wrong calculation. According to Hougan, the error is treating gold’s market cap as a fixed number rather than a moving one.
Hougan projects that if gold’s trajectory holds, the broader store-of-value market will reach around $121 trillion within 10 years.
Hougan also pointed to institutional investment as a driver. Exchange-traded funds, sovereign wealth funds, and growing portfolio allocations are all being cited as forces that could push Bitcoin’s market share higher over the next decade.
“There are still miles to go,” he wrote in a blog post, “but capturing a sixth of the store-of-value market in 10 years doesn’t seem extreme.”
The argument rests on Bitcoin behaving more like gold over time. Right now, it isn’t. Gold struck a record high above $5,327 per ounce in late January and remains within 2.2% of that level.
Bitcoin, by contrast, has been sliding. It’s down sharply from its highs, even as the macroeconomic conditions — debt concerns, inflation uncertainty, geopolitical friction — that typically lift gold have remained very much in play.
That disconnect explains the frustration around Bitcoin’s failure to track gold despite the “digital gold” label that has followed it for years, NYDIG said.
Dalio’s PushbackHis reasoning: central banks are buying gold, not Bitcoin. And Bitcoin, he said, trades less like a commodity hedge and more like a tech stock — something that follows risk appetite rather than countering it.
Bitcoin & Iran-US WarIt moved with risk appetite, not against it — which is exactly the behavior Dalio and others point to when they argue Bitcoin still has a long way to go before it earns the gold comparison.
Featured image from Unsplash, chart from TradingView
