The Bitcoin Price debate moved back to gold after Ray Dalio questioned BTC▲$62,631.00’s safe-haven status and Michael Saylor pointed to its gains.
Ray Dalio, the billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates, said Bitcoin still hasn’t become the safe haven asset many buyers expected it to be.
In a post on X, Dalio said Bitcoin gets plenty of attention, but still falls short of gold for three basic reasons. Specifically, he highlighted the lack of anonymity provided by BTC, the connection between its price and the stock prices of companies operating in the tech industry, and the relatively small market of the digital asset in comparison with gold.
The billionaire wrote:
“Ultimately, gold is more widely held, deeply established, and still plays a central role in the global system.”
Safe havens are supposed to sit there calmly when everything else is selling off. But Dalio argues that the cryptocurrency doesn’t always do that, partly because investors can sell BTC when they need cash.
Read also: Strategy and BitMine Keep Investing in Crypto: BTC and ETH in Focus
Transparency as a Feature
Michael Saylor, the executive chairman of Strategy, the largest Bitcoin treasury company, quickly pushed back. In a reply to Dalio’s X post, Saylor made the comparison in simple terms, writing “Gold is analog capital. Bitcoin is digital capital. Transparency is a feature, not a bug.”
Saylor also pointed back to August 2020, the date Strategy began using Bitcoin as its main treasury reserve asset. Since then, the company has turned itself from a software business with a Bitcoin position into a Bitcoin-heavy public-market vehicle.
However, it would be fair to say that the key element for making Dalio’s point regarding gold and Bitcoin lies with something the cryptocurrency still does not have in the financial system: central banks.
Central banks control, store, and use gold in the monetary infrastructure. Although Bitcoin has managed to make some steps with governments and corporations in general, it has yet to get there in terms of becoming an official reserve asset.
- The Czech National Bank is probably the closest live example. Its governor, Aleš Michl, pushed the bank to study Bitcoin and said in 2025 that he could consider putting as much as 5% of the CNB’s roughly €140 billion in reserves into BTC.
- It’s still unclear whether the central bank has allocated any of those funds to Bitcoin.
Read more: Phong Le: Strategy Will Start Selling Bitcoin When It’s More Profitable
