Bitcoin (BTC) proponents continue to poke fun at gold bugs as the precious metal’s 10-year returns flip negative.
As of Tuesday, fresh data shows tha XAU/USD traded 3.7% lower than it did on the same day in 2011.
Gold fails to impress — On any timeframe
It’s been a bad week for gold and its investors — a sharp fall on Monday has consolidated losses that have characterized much of 2021.
Starting the year at $1,941, XAU/USD was down to $1,729 at the time of writing — a year-to-date loss of 10.9%.
Whereas longer-term performance had previously saved gold from humiliation, as of this month, even a 10-year hodl is a dubious investment. On Aug. 1, 2011, the precious metal traded at $1,830, or 5.8% higher.
In the meantime, Bitcoin has vastly outperformed not only gold but every major commodity in terms of dollar gains and shows no sign of reversing to give gold any form of competitive advantage.
“A single bitcoin is now worth 21 ounces of gold. Poetic,” trading platform FTX summarized last week.
Priced in BTC, gold thus looks even weaker at just 0.038 BTC per ounce as of Tuesday. Its all-time lows of 0.02746 BTC occurred as BTC/USD hit current all-time highs of $64,500 in mid-April.
Put another way, 1 BTC now buys almost 600 grams of gold.
“It’s not digital gold!”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, gold industry members were among the few voices publicly championing the precious metal, among them Schiff Gold CEO Peter Schiff.
Related: Flash crash rattles gold markets as Bitcoin holds strong
Blaming gold’s performance on macro market factors, the infamous Bitcoin skeptic maintained that for all its success, Bitcoin could never match it.
“Bitcoin rising as gold falls doesn’t mean it’s replaced gold as an inflation hedge,” he countered this week.
“Gold is down as traders mistakingly think the Fed will successfully fight off inflation by tapering QE and raising interest rates. Bitcoin doesn’t trade like gold because it’s not digital gold!”
His perspective runs contrary to an increasing number of non-crypto voices this year, notably investment mogul Ray Dalio and Jerome Powell, Chair of the United States Federal Reserve. The former, however, recently said that he would still choose gold over BTC.