(Any views expressed below are the personal views of the author and should not form the basis for making investment decisions, nor be construed as a recommendation or advice to engage in investment transactions.)
I was halfway through this week’s newsletter when the news broke: Israel launched strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Just like that, everything I had planned to write about was scrapped.
Geopolitics doesn’t wait for your content calendar. Neither does the market.
And by the way, if you’re asking yourself what I was going to write about this week before the bombs dropped, Paul Tudor Jones did a better job in this full-length interview than I ever could.
Bitcoin sold off immediately — down ~2.5% — and the rest of the crypto market followed. Oil spiked, equities dropped, and of course, Peter Schiff jumped in to remind the world that gold is up 0.85%, while Bitcoin is "failing as a safe haven."
Peter has had some very embarrassing public takes recently (nothing to do with gold or bitcoin, I’ll leave it to you to look into it but it rhymes with shepstein) but this narrative above misses the point entirely.
Let’s run the tape on this “gold vs. Bitcoin” thing for a second.
It’s late. Markets are rattled. Something big just happened — a war scenario, a terror attack, whatever. You’re sitting at home and want to move fast. You’ve got two options: a gold bar or some Bitcoin on a wallet or exchange.
What can you actually do?
That gold bar? Good luck. Unless you know a dealer who picks up calls at 2 a.m. or there's a pawn shop open down the street (and you're okay losing 20% on the spread), it’s a paperweight.
Digital gold on a platform? You're relying on a centralized dealer to give you a quote, which likely hasn’t updated since market close. There’s no price discovery, no order book — just trust in some illiquid database.
Bitcoin? It’s already trading. Price is already moving. You can plug in your hardware wallet, send it to any number of global exchanges, and execute instantly — at a market-derived, verifiable price.
Bitcoin doesn’t sleep. It doesn’t need permission. It doesn’t rely on legacy infrastructure or someone else's vault. It just is.
That’s the point.
I think I actually do agree with Peter — Bitcoin isn’t “digital gold.” That comparison might’ve helped people understand it ten years ago, but today it does more harm than good. Bitcoin is in another league.
Gold was built for a world of vaults and borders. Bitcoin is built for a world of networks and nodes — and for crises that unfold not over weeks, but in real-time, across time zones and screens.
If anything, gold is the analog version of Bitcoin.
Schiff wants to frame this moment as Bitcoin “failing” a test. But the real test is this: in a chaotic, fast-moving world, which asset gives you instant access, global liquidity, and self-custody?
Only one of them does.
Anyway, I’m going to call it a night and pick this back up in the morning. I can sleep well knowing that if the world is truly breaking, 1 BTC will still equal 1 BTC and when the dust settles I’m confident that we will be right back to where we were or higher.
It’s morning now. The headlines are still messy, but the market is doing what it always does — recalibrating in real time.
Bitcoin? Back near $105K.
It never really broke. Just shook out the people who don’t understand what they’re holding.
And when you zoom out for even a second, it all starts to make sense again.
Inflation came in soft this week.
Trump is openly calling for Powell to cut 100bps in one shot.
A new China trade deal was announced.
More deals are rumored to be in the pipeline.
There’s growing talk of Scott Bessent as the next Fed Chair.
AI continues to pull capital into risk assets like a black hole.
This is the kind of backdrop Bitcoin was built for: a slow-motion fiat unraveling, dressed up in the clothes of market optimism.
It’s not a safe haven in the traditional sense — it’s a bet on the future. On a different kind of monetary system. On open networks instead of closed institutions.
And more people are waking up to that every day.
The next leg of this cycle isn’t about price — it’s about understanding. It’s not just NGU technology (number go up). It’s why the number goes up that matters.
Bitcoin isn’t a hedge for WWIII. It’s insurance against a system that’s always just a few steps from breaking — and never really fixes itself.
As for gold? It’ll be fine.
But this isn't 1971.
It's Friday the 13th, 2025 — and the future belongs to assets that don’t shut off when the world heats up.
Here’s to a calm weekend, even if the world isn’t.