On days like this, it’s easy to scoff at bitcoin (BTC) – specifically, the claim that the original cryptocurrency is a store of value, the digital equivalent of gold.
BTC tumbled along with the broader financial markets Monday and briefly dipped below $50,000, its lowest level since February, before retracing some of its losses. Early afternoon New York time, the asset was off 9% on a 24-hour basis, at $53,387.67.
For skeptics, bitcoin’s volatility was an invitation to echo an old Billy Crystal comedy routine: “Where’s your messiah now?”
“The Bitcoin ‘store of value’ thesis is getting blown up right now,” Bloomberg columnist Joe Weisenthal crowed on X (formerly Twitter). “Bitcoin doesn’t look like The New Gold. It looks like 3 tech stocks in a trenchcoat.”
But there’s a more nuanced view on this question that requires zooming out the figurative lens.
“We shouldn’t confuse store-of-value assets with flight-to-quality assets,” said my colleague Andy Baehr, head of product at CoinDesk Indices. “The former is a long-term expectations property and the latter is a flows and fast market property.”
The “long term” part is key.
On a day like Monday, with the Nikkei falling 12% and the vibe inviting comparisons to 1987’s “Black Monday,” U.S. Treasury bonds “tend to become this flight-to-quality asset that everybody zooms into,” Baehr said. Treasury yields, which move in the opposite direction as prices, are at their lowest levels since January.
Bitcoin clearly doesn’t enjoy flight-to-quality status.
“It’s still undoubtedly a volatile, in many cases speculative, in many cases levered, in many cases traded asset,” Baehr said. “But its properties hold promise that, over time, its scarcity, its portability, and its lack of attachment to any government or corporation’s policies make it a really interesting asset to consider as a store of value.”
Investors who look at bitcoin this way are thinking of it not as a safe haven from day-to-day market volatility, but rather as an insurance policy against the steady erosion of the greenback’s purchasing power. The supply of bitcoin is predictable and fixed at 21 million, immune from the whims of policy makers.
“Those who hold it for long periods of time, especially those who have concerns about … the national debt, central bank policy, all of these things … feel as if it’s not so much bitcoin going up [that matters] but its denominator declining in value,” Baehr said.
Counterintuitive though it may seem, it is possible for something to be both a risk asset and a store of value at the same time, he added. “People who use bitcoin as a store of value are not unaware of its volatility.”
Arthur Breitman, a co-founder of the Tezos blockchain protocol and a crypto O.G., noted that bitcoin’s resistance to confiscation makes it a “store of value” in another sense.
“Bitcoin is a good store of value if … bank accounts are being seized,” he wrote in a reply to Weisenthal on X. “It’s contextual.”
In a separate reply to Weisenthal, Dan McArdle, co-founder of crypto data service Messari, quote-tweeted an old post in which he described how he expected bitcoin to perform during different types of calamities.
It should “selloff under liquidity-crisis scenarios, ramp on sovereign-debt/fiat-confidence crises,” McArdle wrote in 2018. Monday was an example of the former.
As for a more time-tested store of value, the price of gold was down about 1% Monday afternoon.
“It’s unfair to judge bitcoin against something that’s thousands of years old as a store of value when it’s still in its infancy,” said Alex Thorn, head of firmwide research at crypto investment bank Galaxy Digital, referring to comparisons to gold.
Buying bitcoin is a “venture-like bet on its future as a store of value,” he said. “Bitcoin is still becoming adopted. That’s why it has both volatility and growth potential.”
