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.
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That’s the backdrop against which Bitwise Asset Management’s chief investment officer is making the case that Bitcoin could still reach $1 million a coin within a decade.
A Different Way To Run The Numbers
Most 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.
Gold has grown at roughly 13% annually since 2004, climbing from $2.5 trillion to around $38 trillion — driven by rising government debt concerns, geopolitical tension, and loose monetary policy.
Hougan projects that if gold’s trajectory holds, the broader store-of-value market will reach around $121 trillion within 10 years.
At that scale, Bitcoin would only need to capture 17% of the total — about one-sixth — to be worth $1 million per coin. That’s a notably different ask than the 50% figure critics typically cite.
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 Gap Between Thesis And Charts
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.
Research out of NYDIG addressed this gap directly in early March. Bitcoin does not appear to be getting priced as a macro hedge, a sovereign risk hedge, or an inflation trade, according to the firm’s global head of research.
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 Pushback
Dalio added his voice to the skeptics’ side earlier this month, arguing that gold remains a far stronger long-term store of value.
His 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.
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Bitcoin & Iran-US War
Bitcoin’s recent price action tells the story plainly. A US-Israeli military strike on Iran in late February triggered over $300 million in crypto liquidations, pushing Bitcoin lower before a partial recovery followed signals that the conflict could be winding down.
It 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
