DQ

THE GOLDEN AGE The fiat crisis has begun. So what wins in the end: gold, digital gold, or some other kind of precious metal or cryptocurrency? Only time will tell, and different assets have different failure modes, but here are some thoughts. (1) First: remember that Bitcoin's value proposition is seizure resistance. Not your keys, not your coins. (2) To explain what that means, think through the mechanics of physical gold. It's great...if you can buy it, transport it, secure it, and sell it safely. But it's much easier to do that when you live in a highly organized state, like China. However, such a state can also track you to your doorstep to seize the gold, once it runs up in price. That's what FDR did in the 1930s and what China is fully capable of doing in the 2020s: (3) So when you think through the game theory, as the price of gold rises, the cries to tax (or seize!) the physical gold will also rise. Note: we need not even mention paper gold here. In a true crisis, such claims are not worth the paper they're printed on. That's why many countries are repatriating their gold. Not your bricks, not your gold! (4) By contrast to physical gold, digital gold (and cryptocurrency more generally) can be securely bought, sold, sent, and received at any time, in any amount, and in any location. It is invisible, international, instantaneous, and internet-native. And it is transportable, programmable, and easily verifiable in a way gold bricks simply aren't. (5) In particular, digital gold is seizure-resistant in a way that physical gold is not. The same holds true for cryptocurrency as a class. Go back to the fundamentals: seizure resistance is part of why cryptocurrency was invented as an alternative to precious metals. (6) This is not to say that physical gold won't have its day. If you live in a safe, small country like the United Arab Emirates, you may be able to buy your gold and eat it too. They probably won't expropriate property there. (7) Moreover, it is quite likely that many countries (particularly in the East) will soon re-standardize their currencies on gold, or digital gold, or some mixture of precious metals and digital assets. As I've been noting for years, BRICs has been stacking gold bricks: (8) However, don't overreact towards gold. The successors to the American Empire are China and the Internet. You should think of this as the past and the future replacing the present. China will replace the dollar with gold, along with physical commodities that it can touch, feel, and control. Meanwhile, the Internet will replace the dollar with digital gold, along with digital assets that it can encrypt, script, and verify. (9) So: feel free to hedge as you see fit between the physical past and the digital future, with just one caveat: namely, you may not want to buy physical precious metals unless you're in a financially and physically secure region of the world. That probably means being outside North America and Western Europe. Because those countries are in the midst of sovereign debt crisis. And as that crisis deepens, both their failing states and their angry mobs are going to be hunting for whatever they can steal. (10) In other words, what's much more important than allocation is location. Ray Dalio expressed this obliquely in one of his earlier interviews, where he said that "location" is a risk: What Ray actually meant is: if you live in a jurisdiction that heavily depends on the dollar (which includes the entire G7), you want to get out. Because the total pauperization that follows the end of the dollar may mean that angry mobs (or government agents, or both) may come to your home, steal your assets, and perhaps rip you limb-from-limb in the process. A cheery thought...yet also historically precedented. That's what came to Eastern Europe and Asia in the 20th century during the rise of communism. And that's what may come to North America and Western Europe after the end of Keynesianism. Prior to such a situation, you really do not want to buy gold bricks, which you can't transport through an airport. You want to hit the bricks. You want to move faster, escape things. Get as far away from the dollar zone as you can...but physically first, rather than financially. After all, "staying and fighting" a sovereign debt crisis caused by decades of money printing is like staying and fighting a volcanic eruption caused by decades of earth moving. You didn't cause it, and you can't stop it, but you can easily be wrecked by it. So emigrate just as the early Americans emigrated from Europe. Unless you believe the Irish Americans "betrayed" Ireland by leaving, unless you really want to spend the rest of your life paying down welfare and warfare debts you didn't incur, you should change your location out of the G7. And then do whatever allocation you like. Or just ignore this analysis and do what you see fit. Your call, of course. If so, I really do hope my MAGA friends are right that "The Golden Age of America Begins Right Now." Because I also think we are on the verge of a type of Golden Age, and a Bitcoin Age...but in a very different way.