Former chief technology officer (CTO) of the largest U.S.-based crypto exchange, Coinbase – Balaji Srinivasan – has made an important Bitcoin statement and predicted that BTC will eventually flip gold as an asset.
He highlighted that Bitcoin has already reached the status of a global reserve asset and explained why investors and even nations will eventually pick BTC over the most popular precious metal – gold.
“Bitcoin is already the global reserve asset”
While claiming the world’s flagship cryptocurrency Bitcoin to be the global reserve asset, Srinivasan shared an argument that any entity/individual can purchase or sell any amount of BTC “at any time in any country on any device for a known price,” and they will not need an intermediary to do that.
“Nothing else is like this,” he said.
Think about the logistics.
To sell $10M in gold, you need to securely transport bricks across borders to a physical gold exchange.
But to sell $10M in digital gold, you just click a button to instantly find a willing buyer anywhere in the world.
Or a set of buyers, as you can… pic.twitter.com/N0fpFGCT1Q
— Balaji (@balajis) December 11, 2024
Bitcoin to flip gold, per Srinivasan
The major arguments in favor of Bitcoin surpassing gold in the future provided by the former Coinbase CTO were logistics and liquidity. In order to sell mammoth amounts of gold, such as $10 million worth of it, for example, he tweeted, gold bricks will have to be securely transported across borders to a physical gold exchange.
With Bitcoin, it only takes a few clicks to find a buyer in any corner of the world. Besides, that $10 million worth of BTC can be sold to multiple buyers as easily as to one.
Balaji Srinivasan provided the example of Germany repatriating 3,378 tons of gold from New York’s Federal Reserve between 2013 and 2020 – the difference between transporting that amount of gold compared to Bitcoin is tremendous, the millionaire says: “From years and millions of dollars to minutes and tens of dollars in transaction fees.” The gold had been taken to the U.S. to prevent it from falling into the hands of the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Besides, Srinivasan stated that while large crypto exchanges used to crash in the past from the huge volume of buy and sell orders, trading gold in the same amounts would be impossible since many people trade their gold bricks, coming to exchanges in person: “They just couldn’t do it.”
The conclusion, the former Coinbase CTO reached is that Bitcoin liquidity surpassed that of gold by a minimum of 1,000x and probably even 10,000x. That is why Bitcoin will eventually flip gold, he believes.
