I’m currently watching Dan Tapiero with Pomp, discussing gold vs bitcoin on his podcast on YouTube. It’s a really interesting conversation, especially where things got a little heated up when it came to discussing about something Pomp put out recently, that Bitcoin will displace gold over time.
Here’s the episode in full.
Who is Dan Tapiero?
But first, who is Dan Tapiero? He’s a global macro investor and a co-founder at Gold Bullion International, managing trillion dollar portfolios. Now, prior to this video, I haven’t heard of him, or read any of his articles or seen his videos regarding his views about bitcoin, so I was coming into this blind, and was expecting a unified vision of fiat is bad, but then playing a tug of war over whether bitcoin or gold will prevail as the focal point of the discussion, similar to the Peter Schiff conversation.
I was wrong.
Will bitcoin displace gold?
For a while in the middle of the conversation, there was a lot of debate going on about whether bitcoin will displace gold. The argument Dan had, was that Pomp was coming at this from a technology perspective, while Dan was looking at it from an investment thesis.
From an investment point of view, Gold simply had a much larger market cap, and was going to be the gateway for institutional money to get off fiat. The market cap for Bitcoin simply wasn’t big enough (therefore interesting enough) for institutions to take note, until now.
So from Dan’s perspective, even though Bitcoin’s gains will far outrun that of gold, both will still be positive over the next 10 years, moving in lock-step.
From a technological point of view, and with the digital gold narrative of bitcoin where one (institutions or otherwise) needs to decide if they will hold (or invest) in either bitcoin or gold, it seems like a no-brainer decision to just go straight into bitcoin.
Let me try to explain that from a technology adoption perspective. Technology moves super quick. We all know that. I myself come from a time, where when I was young, there was no internet. I was born in 1979. The first commercial ISPs were only available from 1989!
We used chunky desktop computers with horrendously slow dial-up internet speeds and could literally make a drink and finish it just to wait to get online. Now we have the internet 24/7 on our phones.
So, on to the tech adoption example. When my kids grow up, and can have their own devices, am I going to say “Okay son, you’re a big boy now. Time to do some big boy stuff. Here’s a PC and a dial-up modem. Use it responsibly.”
Fuck no, he’s going to get a mobile phone, internet on his fingertips and all. If I were to give him my prized 486 computer, he won’t even recognise it for what it is.
The point is: Technology jumps for the late adopters. They go straight to the current thing. They don’t go through the phases like we did.
More people will have smartphones than running water or bank accounts by 2021, apparently.
So, from a technological, investment and utility standpoint, I do think people will simply jump straight into bitcoin rather than gold. It is more than a store of value. It is a value driver and a growth of value.
Dan Tapiero is the bitcoin bull of bulls.
OKAY, so the co-founder of Gold Bullion International espousing the value of gold should not surprise anyone.
But, toward the end of the podcast, something interesting happened. When Pomp asked Dan to imagine 10 years out, how the exposure to gold and bitcoin will play out, Dan goes on to say that the bitcoin vs gold argument is not even valid, because bitcoin is much much more than a digital gold proposition.
He says that Bitcoin could be the value protocol for the internet. While gold is a store of value, bitcoin is an entire network.
Which was a great thing to hear, naturally.
Given that the current market cap of gold is about USD$10Trillion, if Bitcoin were to grow into that size with institutional involvement, that would make 1BTC = $500,000.
Cool.
The interview is a really great watch. You should make the time for it.