Gold has outperformed bitcoin by nearly 40% this year
The most embarrassing chart for the crypto industry this year is the price of real gold versus the price of its main digital rival. Since January 1, the yellow metal has rallied 23%, while bitcoin (BTC) has declined 12%. Gold’s outperformance on price isn’t only impressive on an absolute basis but also disproportionately impressive due to gold’s much larger size. Indeed, there’s at least $21 trillion worth of mined gold in the world versus just $1.6 trillion worth of mined BTC. Coded orange for BTC and yellow for gold, Protos has charted the divergence of the two assets as a visual checkpoint for BTC investors. That $21 trillion estimate is at the lower end of many other estimates that acknowledge the length of time for which humans have hidden and hoarded gold. Simon Hunt, for example, thinks that China alone might secretly own 40,000 tonnes of gold — 5X the amount held by the US — and that Russia owns over 11,000. Other researchers have an ar...