Many early bitcoin investors came from the gold world, drawn by the same distrust of paper money. (Photo illustration by Edward Smith/Getty Images)
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Bitcoiners rarely pine for gold’s old-school charm. Why would they? Over five years, their digital darling has outrun the shiny yellow metal nine times over, soaring nearly 1,000% while gold merely doubled.
Yet this year, gold is stealing the spotlight, climbing 45% since January while bitcoin trails at just 20%. That yawning gap is leaving bitcoin fans with a sudden case of metal envy, wondering if their digital gold has lost its luster.
Gold is outpacing bitcoin in 2025 as nervous central banks and pension funds, rattled by inflation, deficits, and global chaos, pour into its battle-tested market. Bitcoin is not faltering, though; the dismay is due in part because its comparison to gold is undercut in the trading pit, where bitcoin moves like a tech stock. Anyway, with bitcoin’s strongest months to come, gold’s edge this year may fade fast.
The pairing of bitcoin and gold isn’t just market chatter. Both are scarce, immune to central bank printing presses, and catnip for anyone who thinks the days of fiat currency (that is, money issued by governments) are numbered. Investors love the comparison, not because it’s perfect, but because it’s a mental lifeline, a way to anchor digital money to something ancient and tangible. The overlap in their appeal drew early evangelists like Trace Mayer, a gold bug turned bitcoiner, who saw digital scarcity as the new frontier. Even bitcoin’s mysterious creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, nodded to gold’s lore. He tied his online birthday to Executive Order 6102, the 1933 edict from President Franklin D. Roosevelt banning citizens from owning gold, and to President Gerald Ford’s repeal of that order with the International Development Association Appropriations Act of 1975.
For that crowd, gold is bitcoin’s natural benchmark. But don’t let the philosophical kinship fool you. Markets don’t care about neat analogies. Bitcoin trades like it’s chasing Tesla’s stock chart, while gold hunkers down as a financial fire blanket.
That split shows in their paths. Bitcoin, born in 2009, initially trading at mere cents, has rocketed past $100,000, a wild ride fueled as much by tech-like hype as its sound money bonafides. Gold, meanwhile, has plodded along, drifting sideways after its 2012 peak near $1,800 and only breaking out to double that in the last two years.
Ed Egilinsky, who runs alternative investments at ETF-provider Direxion, puts it bluntly: “Bitcoin’s a risk-on bet until it proves otherwise.” His firm’s Daily Gold Miners Index Bull 2X Shares, with $990 million in assets, has surged more than 300% this year, riding gold’s wave as a safe haven (leveraged ETFs like this one are designed for short-term active trading and need to be monitored daily).
To Egilinsky, gold acts as a diversifier which can, at times, provide a hedge. Bitcoin, he argues, is more a trading vehicle than chaos-proof anchor—a view the numbers back up.
Since 2017, bitcoin has moved more in step with the tech-focused Nasdaq 100, with an average 30-day correlation of 0.32, while its link to gold is a wispy 0.09. Correlation measures how two assets move together. The closer to 1.0, the tighter the link. In plain English, bitcoin grooves to Silicon Valley’s beat, not Fort Knox’s. It soars with growth stocks and craters when risk appetites fade, while gold shines brightest when the world feels like it’s teetering.
That’s why central banks, rattled by global uncertainty and a falling U.S. dollar, are piling into gold now. The Financial Times notes their combined gold holdings are poised to eclipse their U.S. Treasury positions for the first time since the mid-1990s.
Lawrence Lepard, the founder of Equity Management Associates, sees a “crack-up boom” in the works. That’s an Austrian economics term for when runaway money printing sends folks scrambling to hard assets, a concept Lepard covers in his book The Big Print. Gold is getting the early benefit because pension funds and central banks can stomach it while institutions are still warming up to the wild-child that is bitcoin.
A 2025 report by Henley & Partners, a London-based investment migration consultancy, pegs bitcoin ownership at 295 million people worldwide, a big number until you consider the World Gold Council’s 2025 survey showing 81% of Chinese respondents own gold jewelry. That means there are potentially more gold owners in that one country (population 1.4 billion) than there are bitcoin holders globally. Gold’s liquidity and regulatory blessing make it the go-to for institutions smelling trouble. Bitcoin, still in a regulatory gray zone for many around the world, often lags but swings harder when it moves.
Lepard has embraced both. His $150 million of assets under management EMA GARP fund, sees both assets as bets against a crumbling fiat system. His fund, up 56% in the first half of 2025, holds precious metals miners and bitcoin. Seeing complaints from other bitcoiners, Lepard laughs off the gripes about the “lag” of bitcoin. “Guys, don’t you realize we’re up 80% year over year?,” he chuckles. “I mean, that’s not bad, you know?”
So what is the takeaway for investors?
Gold and bitcoin share a rebel heart, but they’re not twins. Gold’s the grizzled veteran, steady when markets quake; bitcoin is the brash upstart, still tied to a tech like boom-and-bust pulse. At least for now. This year, gold is ahead, but zoom out, and bitcoin’s still outpacing it. And even this year, bitcoin is beating the Nasdaq, its more appropriate benchmark, by over 6%. But there’s reason to think there’s more in store: Since 2013, September has been bitcoin’s worst month, averaging a 3% dip, while October and November have sparked rallies of 22% and 46% on average, respectively, per Coinglass. If that holds, bitcoin could pass gold by Thanksgiving, turning more bullion investors into digital believers.
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