Is Bitcoin Still Digital Gold? WSJ says no. I’ll show you why they’re wrong.

is Bitcoin still a digital gold? Well, the Wall Street Journal wants to ask this question,

and they think they have the answer, and I'm here to argue why they don't, because as usual,

mainstream media, traditional economists, strategists at big corporate banks,

these people do not have the answer, because they don't even understand the question.

Probably, obviously, mainstream media doesn't understand Bitcoin, but they keep talking about it,

they keep using it for clickbait, and they keep getting it wrong. So today, I'm going to do a

little breakdown live of this podcast and this interview, where they talk about this,

and I'm going to explain what they get wrong and the right way to think about these things.

This format is a little bit different for me. I don't have a script. I'm going to do this live.

It's going to be a little more off the cuff, a little more reaction right in the moment.

Leave a comment, let me know if you like this format or you like the typical videos that I normally do.

So this video is going to focus primarily on the is Bitcoin still digital gold narrative and argument.

They're obviously going to say no, and I'm going to tell you why they're wrong. It always has been

digital gold, and it still is despite a 45 or whatever percent drawdown from its peak, you know,

four or five months ago. I'm going to explain all of that, but real quick, if you're new here,

you're watching the sat stackers show a Bitcoin show for people who think deeper about money.

My name is John, aka the sat stacker. If you want to learn to stack smarter and better understand

and grow your conviction in Bitcoin, you hit the subscribe button. You can zap me sats via the QR

card on the screen using your lightning wallet. Let's hear what the Wall Street Journal has to say.

So today's show is interesting because we're going to be talking about an asset that many have

considered in the past to be a safe haven asset, and that's Bitcoin. And I think that's appropriate

because we've had a lot of geopolitical turmoil this past week. No better time for safe havens

than with what's going on these days. But is Bitcoin a safe haven? That's something that we will

discuss later in the show. Okay, so they use Bitcoin in the title of the episode. They tease it,

that this is what the episode is going to be about. Then they talk for 15 minutes about

foreign Iran stuff so they don't talk about Bitcoin until later, mostly when they interview a

woman who's a strategist, economist, and a managing director at Deutsche Bank. But it only took

less than a minute for them to bug me with the way they're framing this because they're saying,

we're going to be talking about an asset that many have considered in the past to be a safe haven

asset. First of all, this is Wall Street Journal. When has anyone in mainstream media come out and

said Bitcoin is a safe haven asset? I think it's a disingenuous framing to start with. The only thing

that mainstream media or economists or anybody in these positions has been telling us for 16 straight

years or 17 now is Bitcoin is too risky to volatile. It's a Ponzi coin. It's a beauty, baby. It's

too a bubble all that stuff. But they've never said Bitcoin is a safe haven asset. I don't think I've

ever even heard Bitcoin or saying Bitcoin is a safe haven asset. Now they're talking about the idea

that it's digital gold. It's a hedge against inflation. All these different things that

Bitcoiners have said. But if you just hear someone say that, you don't understand why they're

saying it, then of course you're going to get the framing wrong. So I think it's a dangerous for

them to say, well, many people have said, have thought Bitcoin is a safe haven asset, but it's not

anymore. No one's ever said Bitcoin is a safe haven asset that's not volatile. We all know it's

volatile and we understand that that's part of the journey of it becoming monetized over time

in its early stages of only having existed for less than two decades. We as Bitcoiners think

Bitcoin is a safe haven from certain things, but not a, hey, the US just struck Iran over the weekend.

Go run and buy Bitcoin because that's going to protect you from a market downturn or whatever.

Nobody thinks that these days. We think it's a safe haven in the long term from things like

government fiat money printing. And I will get into why we think it's a digital gold, but it's not

because of exactly how Bitcoin performs on a chart. Gold has been around for 5,000 years. It's

probably the most trusted, most well-known recognized brand of stable store of value in human history

because it's been that since before any of us were born or born into a world where gold is a

stable store of value and everyone knows that. There's a reason why we say Bitcoin is digital gold,

but it today does not have to do with how it performs on a chart. It has to do with the underlying

properties of what make a commodity good money and what makes a good store of value at the fundamental

level, not at the day-to-day price chart level. So I'm going to get into more of that, but we have to

skip ahead because like I said, they tease it as a Bitcoin video and then they don't talk about

Bitcoin for 15 more minutes. All right, welcome back. We are joined by Marion Labour. She is a

senior strategist and managing director at Deutsche Bank. Marion, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much. Very glad to be here. For a long time, I think the tagline that Bitcoin had was

digital gold, right, that it was a commodity in the way that gold is. There's a limited supply of it,

and it's something that will hold its value over a long period of time. It's kind of inflation proof.

People thought of it as maybe something to turn to when times were risky. And there were times when

that seemed to hold up days when gold would go up, Bitcoin would go up. But over those last six

months, you've been talking about that period of time since last October when Bitcoin has

gone down significantly in price from well over 100,000 to now in the 60, 70,000 range.

Gold has, of course, been surging. So do you think that we can put to bed the idea that Bitcoin

is digital gold or is there something else that's breaking that correlation right now?

I think these days we can't say Bitcoin is digital gold in a long era. It used to be the case,

but clearly as you mentioned, this gold has been outperforming last year. I mean, it was over 60%

up in 2025. Okay, again, I take issue with this idea that it used to be that we could say

Bitcoin is digital gold. Would these people have ever said at any point in the next, in the past 17

years, Bitcoin is digital gold. We agree with that. They never would have agreed with that statement

to begin with. So now they're framing it as well. It used to be that you could say the tagline for

Bitcoin is digital gold. But now you can't because in the last six months, 12 months, gold's got

up in Bitcoin's gone down. This is, to me, a very disingenuous framing. But obviously it speaks to the

number one thing, which is they only see Bitcoin through the lens of an investment, especially in

the short term. And they continually misunderstand what the definition of digital gold means. Why do we

call Bitcoin digital gold? Well, if you haven't heard me say it before, Bitcoin is digital gold,

because it possesses the same underlying monetary properties that gold possesses the properties

that made gold from a shiny yellow metal into a monetary good into a store of value in the

beginning, 5,000 years ago. Any commodity or good can become money as long as it possesses the

right properties, durability, portability, divisibility, fungibility, verifiability, and scarcity.

If they commodity good possesses those properties, it can enter into a free market competition

of monies against other things. And the commodity that best exhibits those properties and also has

the lowest inflation rate, the highest stock to flow ratio, that commodity will outcompete other

goods. Humans have used many different things as money over time because shells and beads and tobacco

and salt, then all these different things, rhinestones and many, many examples. When a weaker money

encounters a stronger money in the wild, the stronger money demonetizes the weaker money. So

the thing that is worse at storing its value over time or exhibiting those monetary properties

that I mentioned, that thing will get demonetized, which is why salt beads, shell, shells, tobacco,

rhinestones, none of those things are money. Today, gold is still a store of value because it

out-competed all the other commodity goods that came up against it. When I say out-competed,

what it means is a person or group of people who stored their value in gold, their value

appreciated in purchasing power terms against all the other possible stores of value. So everybody else

who was storing their value in something else, their purchasing power went towards or all the way

to zero. When that happens, people either lose all their money, lose all their value because they

stored it in the wrong thing or they switch to the thing that's storing value better. So over time,

the harder money wins, I say that all the time on this channel. Now, the reason we say Bitcoin is

digital gold is because in the same way gold was in the beginning as a physical commodity,

had those properties. Bitcoin today is a digital commodity that has the properties of durability,

portability, divisibility, fungibility, verifiability, and scarcity. And Bitcoin, in a digital world,

is better at portability because you can send a billion dollars of it across the world in 10 minutes.

It's better at divisibility because you can divide it down into tiny fractions of a cent and

recombine the units back into a full Bitcoin or multiple big coins. It beats gold on verifiability

because the base layer is by design, a public open, auditable ledger. Some people think that's bad

for privacy, but it's my belief you optimize for transparency and auditability on the base layer

and you build privacy on layers above that. Whereas with gold, we have no way of knowing A,

how much gold is even exists above the ground, how much gold exists below the ground,

how much gold is mined every year, how much is introduced into the circulating supply,

how much do central banks hold, for example? Do they hold the gold they say they hold? Nobody knows,

nobody can check. And then, of course, they can centralize all the gold. We don't know whether

they have it or how much they have. Then they print paper claims on top of the gold and then we

have no ability to check whether the paper claims are actually backed by the underlying gold.

And then whenever they want, they can sever the tie between the paper claims and the actual

underlying gold. And that is the history of the fiat money we have today. That's exactly what

happened. Why fiat money is no longer backed by gold. Now, obviously, we have to be vigilant and

careful about the same exact thing not happening to Bitcoin where all that gets centralized and then

papered over. And then the underlying 21 million Bitcoin supply cap no longer matters if people,

if governments and banks on top of it can print as much fake paper Bitcoin as they want.

We have to be careful to make sure that doesn't happen again. But the way Bitcoin is built,

it's verifiable and auditable and public and transparent on the base layer. So it gives us the tools

we need to verify that they're not doing that and try to stop them from doing it before it happens.

And the self custody aspect gives you the ability to hold your own keys with draw your Bitcoin from

an exchange, verify it on your own note, know that you have it, not trust that some third party is

holding it and they pinky promise it's all there. And Bitcoin, of course, beats gold on scarcity.

Not only is the total supply fixed and capped at 21 million forever, which we can't say it's

true for gold, but we also know the monetary policy and the supply issuance schedule. So it's not

just that we know that there will never be more than 21 million Bitcoin. It's that we also know

that we know exactly how much will be mined and introduced into the circulating supply,

supply every year, every day, every couple weeks, every year, every four years.

That again makes Bitcoin more transparent. We already know that after the last having,

Bitcoin's inflation rate is lower than golds. The amount of Bitcoin being introduced into the

new circulating supply is lower than what we estimate the amount of gold being introduced

into the supply every year. So especially in a digital world, Bitcoin has gold beat on those

fundamental underlying monetary properties. Those are the properties that made gold gold.

It's not what Peter Schiff or all these disingenuous people would say is, oh, well, it has

gold is gold because it has practical use cases in the real world in that you can use it in

electronics and industrial use cases and you can use it for jewelry. Therefore, it has a fundamental

floor of its value that it'll never drop below and Bitcoin doesn't have that Bitcoin can go to zero

because there's no real world practical use case for Bitcoin. They say this all the time.

First of all, it's ridiculously disingenuous because 80 to 90 percent of gold's value

is strictly from the monetary premium of gold being a store of value. So if gold were not used

as a store of value, its price would collapse by 80 to 90 percent overnight. So your fundamental

floor argument is like, well, yeah, okay. So I store my value in gold because even if people stopped

using it as a store of value, it would only collapse from $5,000 to $500 an ounce. That's not

why you store value in gold. That argument makes no sense and it also makes no sense to say,

oh, it has value because it's used in electronics and industrial processes because it had value

as a store of value before it was ever used in electronics or in industry. How do you square

the circle on that? How do you say, oh, gold has fundamental value because of those things when

it had that value before those things ever came along. So you have to look before it was used

in electronics and industry to say, well, why did gold become a store of value in the first place?

Yes, it was used as jewelry and it has value as jewelry, but that's totally speculative and

totally subjective and totally different from any fundamental practical use case that you could

argue. It definitely has a floor of value. If people just said, I don't want to wear gold jewelry

anymore. That's just like a fashion choice. You can't argue that that gives it inherent value that

will never go away. You have to understand that gold went along the normal process of monetization

that commodity monies go through. If first was a collector's item, that's the first step. Before

store of value, meet-and-mix change, you didn't have account. Something becomes a collector's item.

People desire it and they start figuring out, well, this thing, it's pretty, it seems to hold

its value over time. That's interesting. You can make jewelry out of it, etc. Then as more and more

people use it as a collector's item and understand it starts to become known for the ability to store

value, then it moves into the store of value phase. I would argue we don't know how long that took

for gold because this is thousands of years ago. How long did it take for gold to become desired as

jewelry and as a collector's item? Then how long did it take for it to go from collector's item to

widely recognized store of value that increases in purchasing power over time? We don't know,

probably longer than 17 years, I would guess. Then what happens is, once it's widely recognized

as a store of value, people start being willing to use it as a medium of exchange. It doesn't happen

the other way around. Nobody says, hey, I want to do trade in just X thing, just because. Trade

me your labor or something else to value for bird feathers. Why would I do that? Bird feathers

don't hold me value. No, it goes, gold becomes a store of value. Then somebody says, I will trade

you my labor or I'll trade you something else to value a cow or whatever for your gold because I

know that the gold stores value and it's salable, meaning I can sell the gold to someone else

for in exchange for something else to value at a later date. It's probably going to increase

in purchasing power over time. Store of value, then medium of exchange, which is why you again debunk

the, well, no one uses Bitcoin, she's going to say this later, we'll get to it later.

No one uses Bitcoin as a currency or as a medium of exchange argument or whatever. I'm getting

ahead of myself. And then obviously after somebody becomes a medium of exchange, then if you'll

start pricing other things in that thing, then it becomes a unit of account. But this happens

over decades centuries, who knows? It definitely doesn't happen in 17 years. There's no way to know

how long it took for gold, but arguing that it should have already happened for Bitcoin in 17 years

is my opinion ridiculous. But we'll cover some of this in a second. Let's see what you have to say.

If I record performance for gold, and if I look at the shun dollar and reasons for that, it's

because central banks, especially the bricks, have been buying a lot of gold. We had some geopolitical

uncertainty as well. It was still considered as a safe asset. And for this reason, we've seen

a record performance for gold. Last year, for Bitcoin, it was not the case. Bitcoin was done by

over six percent in 2025. Here's what I want to say about that. So part of the reason why price

of gold went up is because central banks have been buying more of it because it's a safe haven

asset. Again, the most trusted store of value, they trust it when they don't trust anything else,

meaning each other's fiat currencies or treasury bonds or whatever, because it's been around for

five thousand years and it's been proven to store value. Well, now the idea that this is a criticism

of Bitcoin. We'll central banks buy gold and the price of gold went up and price of Bitcoin

went down. And this is a criticism and this means Bitcoin is not a store of value. Well, I would

literally all that's happening there is there's an information asymmetry between these two things.

There's an information gap. But everything that I just explained to you about why we believe

Bitcoin is digital gold. They don't see that or understand that. The rest of the market doesn't

quite see it or understand it yet. Either in the central banks don't either. So the central banks

still buy gold. The 20th century, 19th century, 18th century store of value asset that is not as good

at being money and not as good at being a store value as Bitcoin is, but they still don't realize

that and they just don't trust it. And they viewed as risky and volatile because it's only

17 years in that creates an opportunity for those of us who study Bitcoin understand what I'm saying

the fundamentals that made gold gold are the same fundamentals that make Bitcoin digital gold.

And that is where the opportunity lies. So if you see that gap and you go, Hey, I can buy the thing

that nobody else realizes is better than gold beats gold on all these other properties. I can buy

before the vast majority of the world realizes that I get all these great properties of the fact that

it's censorship resistant permissionless digital peer to peer freedom money, which is awesome. And

it's can't be inflated or controlled by governments and no one confront more of it, etc. I get to

reap the benefits of all those wonderful properties and I get to reap the benefits of the fact that

it increases in purchasing power over time. It's likely to go up more as a store of value than

other things because it's better money than gold. It's a better store of value and most people

don't quite realize it yet. But when they do realize it, they're going to come piling in. So I'm

going to want to be there before that happens. That's where the opportunity lies. Now if you view

that as risk like how long is it going to take? How soon is it going to happen? How fast is it going

to happen? When's it going to happen? Those things are all unknowns. Could it drop more in the

short term before it goes up? Of course, those are why people view it as risky and volatile and

therefore they are scared to put too much money in it or any money in it or whatever. And central

banks are going to be probably the most risk averse. At least likely ones to adopt the thing that

basically obviates them. The technology that makes them irrelevant that kills their monopoly on

fiat. Of course, they're going to be the last ones probably to adopt it. The game theory is that

they probably will have to eventually. But the risk is how long is all that going to take? We'll

go down more in the short term, all that stuff. But that's where the gap. That's where the

opportunity lies. Like do you want to take what these people view as some degree of risk and

stomach the volatility for the asymmetric potential of the upside? You don't have to do that. But

I'm just telling you, that's why that exists because there's a information gap that people who

work for Deutsche Bank don't get that yet. What I just explained to you about why it's digital gold.

They look at it on a chart for six months and they go, oh, well, these two things don't perform

the same. So therefore, the thesis is wrong. The short term chart has nothing to do with the

underlying thesis or the fundamentals of why we believe the things we believe about it.

See Bitcoin as a means of payment. It's not a currency. But stablecoins are. What is the

distinction there? And why would you differentiate between the two? I'm an economist by training.

So I like to define digital assets and currency. And the way we use to define a currency is when

it's a store value, a mean of payment and a unit of account. And if I look at Bitcoin,

I think we agree that it's not very stable. It's very volatile. We cannot pay with Bitcoin.

It's not accepted everywhere. If I want to pay for a coffee in London, it's going to be very

very difficult. Okay, so I have to stop it there because at the end of the day, I'm arguing

semantics with her, right? Like the definitions of these words, we can argue that they just

have different definitions. She says a currency has to be a store value, a medium of exchange and

a unit of account. I have to be to say those are the three functions of money. But what's interesting

is about there's basically very few or almost no version of money you can point to that exists in

all three states perfectly at the exact same time. First of all, there are many fiat currencies

around the world that do not store value. So does that exclude them from being called currencies?

Like people use them as medium of exchanges. The Argentina, Venezuela, Turkey,

Lebanon, Iran, you name it, fiat currencies lose value and collapse all the time. So do economists

just say, well, that's not a currency anymore because it's losing value. So their own definition

doesn't even apply. There are many fiat currencies that people use for payments that can't store

value. All fiat currencies don't store value. By the way, even the dollar loses purchasing power

at, I would argue, close to 7% per year since 1971. That's the actual rate of monetary

debatement, not inflation measured by CPI, and the dollars lost, you know, 25% of its value

or whatever since 2020. So it's not a store value either. Therefore, the dollar is not a currency.

So we can equip with these definitions, but they use it to say Bitcoin is not a currency. Well,

Bitcoin does store value over the long term can be used as a medium of exchange. It has the

properties again that it needs to have to be used as a medium of exchange. You can send Bitcoin

to anyone in the world at any time and you can exchange value for it. So it has the properties

that needs to have the rest is just a question of adoption and time. So I go, well, I can't

pay for coffee in London with Bitcoin. Well, first of all, you can. I looked it up. There are

a few different places where you can. Should I list them for London cafes and pubs that accept

crypto payments? Let's go to Brewdog Canary Wharf or something called Chai Ada or Sawmill Cafe or

the Pembery Tavern or the Birds Nest or Rotate or Crypto Burgers or Cafe Nero or Craft Beer.

Social Club. I don't live in London, you know, whatever. She can use it as a medium of exchange.

The rest is just a matter of adoption and timing. I believe more and more places will accept Bitcoin

as payment over time. Here in the US a year ago, you couldn't buy a hamburger with Bitcoin very

easily. Now you can buy one at stake and shake. Like, it's just going to happen more and more. There's

no, I don't really think any reason to expect that it won't. Bitcoin adoption has really only

gone in one direction again over the long term since it's inception. The unit of account

thing is just a red herring. Like I said, the unit of account comes last. These things take time.

People have to first use Bitcoin as a store of value, which is what's been happening. It's been

primarily used as a store of value. Then, over time, when it's more widely recognized as a store

of value, more people hold it, more merchants start to accept it, it's fiat-denominated exchange rate.

Maybe flattened out becomes slightly as volatile. Maybe some of the regulations and laws get

straightened out. We need a diminimous exemption for Bitcoin transactions. We need really to

eliminate capital gains on Bitcoin altogether. There's legal tender laws and other regulations,

like hindering its adoption as a medium of exchange. That's not a reason why it literally

doesn't have the properties or the ability to be used as a medium of exchange. It can be. I can

buy things with Bitcoin and do and have and I can pay for services over the internet with Bitcoin,

etc. Or be paid in it. I don't see Bitcoin as a mean of payment. I don't see Bitcoin as a currency.

I don't see Bitcoin as money. It's the way I see it. It's not as a currency. It's as a crypto asset.

The way I see stablecoin is very different. So, stablecoin has been the idea of stablecoin

is to create a cryptocurrency, which is stable. If we look at the stablecoin market these days,

we have 99% of stablecoins which are pegged, want one to the USD. I would say that these stablecoins

are not very volatile. They are relatively stable and we can use them as a store value and

as a payment for some objects. So, here we go. First of all, saying stablecoins are currency

or they are money because they are pegged to the dollar. So, they're the stable store value.

I would argue the dollar is not a stable store of value. It goes down, like I said,

on average, 7% in purchasing power every year based on how much money they print since 1971.

That's, to me, not a stable store of value. I don't want to store value in something that

loses 50% of its purchasing power in a decade. That would be a very, very ridiculous,

unfortunately stupid thing to do and a lot of people do do it because they don't have a lot of

other choices or they don't have financial education to understand that that's how fast it's going

down. And then go down faster when 2008, 2020, whatever they decide to print a whole bunch of money,

whoopsie, your dollar just lost, you know, 20 or 25% of its purchasing power in a couple years.

So, that's not a stable store value in my opinion either, which disqualifies the dollar

for big money. But, she's also arguing that stablecoins are a medium of exchange. Well, right now,

nobody uses stablecoins as a medium of exchange, really, to actually buy anything.

For as I know, there aren't a lot of merchants that accept them and they're basically mostly

only used for maybe remittances, but vastly majority of them are used for gambling and trading other

cryptos just swapping in and out of stablecoins, why you trade all coins or whatever. That's the vast

majority of the use case. So, the argument of a stablecoin as a medium of exchange rests on

continued increase to adoption, which again is the same argument for Bitcoin. Can you use it

to pay for something? Yes, do a lot of people accept it? No, will more of them accept in the future?

Yes, then it's the exact same argument. See them as money, but privately issued. They are not

issued by a central bank. They are issued by private entities, private companies.

When you talk to investors, and you talk mostly to institutional investors, where do they see

Bitcoin fitting into their portfolios? Is it something that is treated like risky? Like, oh, it

might go up, it might not. Is it treated as something that's not correlated? Like, how would you say

they approach it? I'm talking to companies on the sell side, by side, every day, and the way

there are things Bitcoin. So, you have two types of investors. Those would not like Bitcoin,

because it's based on nothing that don't believe in the long term. They will never invest in

cryptocurrencies, and they will never invest in Bitcoin. They are those investors, especially,

I would say, the younger generations of investors would see some potential to invest in cryptocurrencies,

not all cryptocurrencies, but I would say when I look at the big buy side managers, they mostly

invest in the top 10 cryptocurrencies, and most of them are seeing some long-term potential in

that, even if they are backed by nothing again, and they tend to invest between two to five percent

of their asset and their management. Again, basically, it just goes back to what I was saying,

nobody understands Bitcoin. Like, she's basically confirming the journalist don't understand it,

she doesn't understand it, and the investors she talked to don't understand it. Most of them don't

invest in it at all, because they think it's based on nothing. They don't understand it at all.

Then the other ones who are younger also think it's probably not based on nothing at all, but they might

put two to five percent because they think it might go up, and they do that across the top 10

cryptocurrencies. If you lump Bitcoin in with any other cryptocurrency, you don't understand any of it.

That's my not-so-humble opinion. Every other cryptocurrency is not like Bitcoin. They might as well

be tech stocks, at best. So, you might invest in them for some reason, while you think they're technology,

they're going to do something or they have some use case. But Bitcoin is money with no

issuer and no central bank that it controls the supply and no government that can censor it or

stop it or issue more of it. That's a different use case and a different value prop than every

other cryptocurrency and every other fiat currency. So, nobody understands Bitcoin. Thus, the asymmetric

upside potential. And again, they only see it through the lens of an investment when it's much

more than just that. To have a long-term potential value, does that mean that it would need to actually

move from being an asset as you've described it to being a currency? It depends to who you talk to.

If you talk to CFOs, Treasurers, the multifeditional industry, the way they are seeing cryptocurrencies

is more like a different asset class which is traded. They don't see Bitcoin as a currency. They

don't see Bitcoin as gold or digital gold. But the way they see it is more as an asset which is

maturing over time. But it takes time. And it takes more time than most people had anticipated.

And if I look at, again, this big picture market cap because I keep hearing that the market cap has

been declining a lot and significantly, which is absolutely true. But if we look at what happened since

2023, prices doubled in 2024, doubled again in 2025. And now, we are still at the time we are

talking, we are around like 67,000, which is still huge compared to where we were in 2020, by the way.

Yeah, so at least she understands a little bit. Bitcoin went up more than double two years ago

and three years ago. And last year, I had it down here. But she understands like, you can't just look

at one snapshot of one year and say, oh, it's going to zero or whatever. Angel's understand is

the significance of a $70,000 Bitcoin is still insane in the big picture zoom out 17 years

existence of a brand new crypto asset that never existed before. That's still an insane

accomplishment for it to go from zero to $70,000 in 17 years. And whatever the ultimate,

you know, upside or the ultimate endpoint or wherever Bitcoin said it, it takes time. Like I said,

at the beginning, it's not going to happen overnight. I mean, we just have this, you know, high time

preference, you know, get rich, quick mindset. Bitcoin is not a get rich, quick scheme. Bitcoin is a

don't get poor slowly scheme. I'm just giving it a little bit because they talk about stable coins,

payment stocks, et cetera. Do you think investors should think differently about stable coins and

Bitcoin? Maybe in their minds, they kind of think of them all as part of crypto and maybe their

high on crypto or low on crypto. But do you think it's at this point enough reason for an investor

to say, you know what? Okay, maybe the price of Bitcoin will go down. Maybe it will kind of stay

here for a long time. But I can be bullish about stable coins. Do you think that someone can

separate those things in their mind as an investor? I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt.

He's the journalist who's asking questions of the expert. And maybe he's just sort of playing

dumb to get an answer. But this question, obviously a little bit silly. As an investor, should you

think of Bitcoin as different from stable coins? Stable coins are not an investment. They are

designed to be pegged to a fee of currency. They don't go up or down. So you can be bullish on like

adoption of stable coins or you could buy the parent company a circle. If you think they'll be

more adopted or whatever, but obviously they are not at all the same thing in terms of looking

through the lens of an investor. So to me, I'm not going to kill the guy again. He's just asking

the questions to let her give the expertise. But I think that reveals a fundamental misunderstanding

of what is even going on here. Like is just he just has one big circle on his brain that says

crypto and the Bitcoin and stable coins and all coins are all just in that area of his brain.

Does it understand the difference between any of them? She does call that out very gently. And

it's like, well, yeah, they're not safe. They get all. I think we should. First of all, because

stable coins, I mean, don't walk back to the to the dollar. They are they are brought to

stable. So you don't invest in a stable coin for profit because they should be more less stable.

Stable coin is privately issued currency, which can be used as a mean of payment. So very different.

The way I see Bitcoin again, it's a crypto asset where you can believe in pricing fees or you can

say that it's based on nothing. The value is based on wishful thinking because when we look at

this at the value of Bitcoin, I still think part of the valuations we had, especially end of last

year, when we were around 120,000 dollars, it was based on some fundamental factors. And it was

also partly based on wishful thinking. The fact that people still expect the price to be higher,

they continue to increase the exposure to Bitcoin, but it's based on nothing. It's a speculative

way of seeing Bitcoin. Obviously, again, I global with the stable coins can be medium of exchange,

use for payments and Bitcoin can't. It's just a crypto asset. Don't really get the argument

there because you can hold Bitcoin as a crypto asset and as investment. And you can transfer

to someone else peer to peer across the internet with no middleman in between and no one can stop you

and you can get something of value in exchange for that transfer like a different currency or a

different asset or a product or service. So it can obviously be used as a medium of exchange. I

don't really get to say stable coins can be used or a medium of exchange or currency or payment

mechanism and Bitcoin's not. It doesn't really make sense. It's just saying, oh, I don't think

there's enough adoption from merchants and people using Bitcoin as transactions today at this one

snapshot. Or I think there should have been more of that in the first 17 years of its existence.

And because it doesn't match my expectation of how much there should have been, then it's not that

thing. I feel like it's like saying, hey, I invented this thing called blue jeans. Someone says,

well, nobody wears them. Therefore, they're not pants. And I said, well, they are pants. Like they

have the properties that one would need to use them as pants. It's just a matter of whether or not

people will continue to choose to use them as pants. And I can say, well, there's hundreds of people

using them as pants today and you say, well, that's not enough. So they don't qualify as pants.

How many's enough? Thousands, millions, billions. There's no like specific delineating line of like

crosses from being not a currency into being a currency. Once one million people use it to pay for

things or whatever. So I don't know. It's just quibble. Again, semantics and quibble with these

definitions. But I just don't love how they try to do this thing with the definitions and semantics

to dismiss what Bitcoin is entirely or they just fundamentally misunderstand it and put out

misinformation about it. Then of course, my biggest problem, probably of the whole entire video,

that little clip you just saw right there, they use that at the very beginning as their tease

for the rest of the video. The part that I'm not necessarily going to like disagree with is like

was part of the run up 226,000 all time high on October was part of that mania and speculation

and wishful thinking that's going to keep going higher. Yes, probably. That's basically every asset

works when there's a run up and you start to see price appreciation. That's when retail

FOMO is in at the hope that it's going to keep going up and they can make a quick buck or whatever.

Gold just did that. Silver just did that. They both came crashing back down silver more so after that

happened. So part of any rapid price run up is retail speculation and FOMO and mania. But of course,

she then says the key thing, which is, but it's based on nothing. It's all speculation. I

interpreted what she said to me. It's all based on nothing. It's all speculation, not just the run up

from 100 to 126, but the entire 126,000 is based on nothing. That, of course, the whole reason I

made the video that brings me back to the points I made at the very beginning. Why did gold become

monetized? Why is gold a store of value to begin with? What gives it value? Why do people believe

that it will store value? Those fundamental underlying properties that made gold into a store of

value at the beginning are the same fundamental underlying properties that make Bitcoin into money

and into a store of value. This is the number one thing that I have not seen anybody successfully

refute. When having time to watch Peter Schiff both smoke as asked, or that you can't find a way

to, for these people to square the circle on, you cannot argue that gold is a store of value and

that has fundamental underlying value and has inherent value or intrinsic value or whatever.

And there's a reason why people could and should and will always want to buy it and hold value in

it. You cannot argue that that is true without also understanding why the same logic applies

to Bitcoin. If it applies to one, it applies to the other. And if it doesn't apply to one, it

doesn't apply to the other. That to me is one of the fundamental unlocks for understanding

Bitcoin. It's one of the fundamental things that helped me understand Bitcoin and realize why it is

the thing that I believe it is. Are there risks in the short term? Is there volatility? Are there

other reasons why there's other threats or risks to why this possibility that Bitcoin won't achieve

the same 5,000 year trajectory that gold achieved? Of course, there's other risks. That's why there's

an opportunity. So if you understand why gold had value and you understand the same property

is applied to Bitcoin, that's when you make the connection. I think that this thing is going to go

on a trajectory similar to what gold did. Do we have to watch out for other risks that a digital

commodity faces that a physical commodity doesn't? Sure, but a physical commodity also has drawbacks

and reasons why it's not as good in a digital world or why it got its monetary use and its

use as a currency stripped away from it because of the way governments were able to centralize it

and print paper on top of it and then relegate gold to this shiny yellow rock store value that

just sits in vaults forever and it can't be used as a medium of exchange for payments in a digital

world. So the physical commodity has drawbacks too and the digital commodity has ways that it improves

on gold and it has the properties it also needs to have to store value. So that's why Bitcoin,

I believe, has the asymmetric upside that no other asset in the planet has and it also has the

properties of being peer-to-peer, sensitive, persistent, permissionless, digital freedom money

for 8 billion people that also appreciates in purchasing power terms forever. That is why I highly

suggest you study Bitcoin and you quit slacking and start stacking.