Comparisons between bitcoin and gold have been made since the early days of the crypto asset’s existence. Satoshi Nakamoto once likened his creation into a base metal like gold that can be instantly transported anywhere in the world, and fellow cypherpunk Nick Szabo Bitcoin’s predecessor was literally called Bit Gold.

The “digital gold” narrative around bitcoin became stronger in 2017, he said the resolution of the block size war on the Bitcoin network brought the bitcoin store of value use case into focusand payment-focused use cases eventually shifted mostly to the stablecoin model, which is now a key part of the crypto dispute because of this high degree of centralization. While there are pushes to develop bitcoin-denominated payments secondary protocol layers such as Lightning Network and Arkthe truth is that most people are only interested in bitcoin as a kind of long-term digital savings account, at least for now.

As the new competitor in the market of safe assets, it is believed that bitcoin is “fastest horse in the race“in a potential move away from government bonds and towards various hedges against inflation. However, that is not the case, as gold has significantly outperformed bitcoin over the past year. In fact, gold has now outperformed bitcoin over the past five years, which has never happened before.

Gold and silver have combined for the equivalent of 15 whole bitcoins worth of market cap in the last 12 months. impeccable boomer victory. pic.twitter.com/UFszL7uny1

— nic carter (@nic_carter) January 29, 2026

The past few days have been particularly crazy, because gold has been able to increase more than doubled Bitcoin’s total market cap to total market value in a matter of 72 hours. Gold added $3.5 trillion to its market cap during that time, while bitcoin’s market cap currently stands at $1.67 trillion.

Gold also experienced a nearly 10% sharp crash on Thursday before recovering back around the $5,350 level, prompting comparisons to how bitcoin can swing wildly on a daily basis. This may be due to the curse of crypto exchanges being linked to the hyped-up asset class at the moment. Sometimes the embrace from the likes of Coinbase be a major top signal, as happened when the crypto exchange launched its own NFT market in 2022.

Stablecoin issuer Tether also made headlines this week for revealing its $24 billion gold stash, making it largest known holder of the precious metal outside of central banks and traditional financial institutions. Despite these great assets, Tether still struggles to gain the respect of traditional finance, received the lowest possible score from S&P Global’s stablecoin rating framework late last year.

In terms of the reasoning behind the outperformance of gold compared to bitcoin, the theories range from concerns related to quantum computers on greater relative interest in gold to bitcoin from central banks (not that interest in bitcoin from nation states is completely absent). Especially, China is a major buyer of goldwhile the The US is more interested in using bitcoin and crypto to strengthen his economic dominance.

In 2017, at its peak of nearly $20k, Bitcoin was worth 14.25 ounces of gold. Now it costs 16 ounces. That’s a 12% gain in nine years. Is it worth the risk to lose gold by just 1.3% per year? HODLers will find out the hard way as Bitcoin crashes and gold continues to rise.

– Peter Schiff (@PeterSchiff) January 29, 2026

Despite the long-held theory that bitcoin could act as a safe haven in times of global economic turmoil, it hasn’t acted that way so far, as most recently demonstrated during the tensions around Greenland.

While this It is unclear whether bitcoin is currently at the end of another four-year cycleThis recent outperformance from gold has given some bitcoin holders the idea that it is still early days for the crypto asset and Gold only increases the size of the total addressable bitcoin market. Of course, some say that recent price movements are simple proof that the future of apolitical value storage still belongs to the precious metal which has been considered money for thousands of years.