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June 26, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
27:56
Bitcoin vs. Gold: Which is a better store of value?
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Mike Adams.
Google is suppressing real independent journalism that's seeking to blow the whistle on this medical holocaust against children.
The Health Ranger Report.
If Google had existed in the Nazi regime, they would have been the search engine of the Third Reich.
It's time for the Health Ranger Report.
And now for NaturalNews.com, here's Mike Adams.
My recent warnings about Bitcoin created quite a stir, some of it negative in the Liberty community.
I want to offer actually a more detailed analysis of Bitcoin versus gold because what I see out there is a lot of bad thinking about this topic.
So this is going to be very objective.
There's a place for Bitcoin and there's a place for gold, but they're very different from what is being stated out there by many of the Bitcoin promoters, some of whom are really unscrupulous.
Not all of them.
There are some honest folks, but some are really just con artists at this point.
Kind of sad.
So let me give you the analysis here.
Most people should be thinking right now about how to preserve assets.
End of story.
That's it.
You shouldn't be thinking about how to make money in a speculative bet on gold or Bitcoin.
You should be thinking about how to not lose all your money.
Because what's coming in terms of the global collapse and the debt collapse and the government collapses and the currency collapses, all of this stuff...
This is going to be a game of who can not lose their assets.
And people out there who are thinking in a speculative context about, oh, what's going to make more money, Bitcoin or gold?
People, that is the wrong question.
That's a question asked by people who do not have wisdom and experience in understanding market crashes and assets and risk.
That's the wrong question.
If you are trying to think about how you can make money off of Bitcoin or make money off of gold, you're not informed.
I'm sorry to say that.
You're not informed.
Because speculation in Bitcoin is a very, very dangerous game.
Yes, Bitcoin could go to $10,000 a coin.
It could go to $100,000.
It's true.
It could.
But it's not real until you sell it.
Whereas gold is real the moment you buy it.
Follow me on that?
Gold is real the moment you buy it.
The moment you have it in your hands, it's real.
And gold can't be taken away from you.
It doesn't disappear because of people's fear.
Gold can't have a massive sell-off that takes its value to zero.
Gold can't be destroyed by a solar flare, or an EMP attack, or a nuclear war.
If the internet goes down, gold is still gold, but bitcoin is nothing.
You can even melt gold and it's still gold.
Because gold is an element.
It's part of the table of elements.
It's rooted in the laws of physics.
Whereas Bitcoin is not.
Bitcoin is rooted in the laws of, you know, software.
Which is a human construct and it can disappear.
Now, this doesn't mean that Bitcoin doesn't have a use.
And I want to be honest and fair about that.
Bitcoin does have a very good use.
It's very good.
I'm really calling it now your escape hatch currency.
Bitcoin is great for escaping a tyrannical government getting out of a nation that, you know, like Venezuela, for example, getting out without having to carry your assets in a physical form.
You know, Bitcoin is great because it doesn't weigh anything.
You can carry it in your head, essentially, by remembering your password to an online wallet, or you can carry it on an encrypted thumb drive.
Which is a very, very small object.
You could even, I guess, technically embed it in a chip and put it under your skin or something if you really had to.
You could microchip yourself with Bitcoin.
Wouldn't that be hilarious?
But you could.
You know, that can actually, you could escape with Bitcoin.
I mean, let's suppose that you're living in Brazil or you're living in Venezuela or somewhere where the whole system is collapsing all around you, which might be California one day soon for all we know.
And the governments are coming in and confiscating land and confiscating gold, which they love to do.
And they're confiscating firearms.
And they're taking over everything and just stealing all your stuff.
You could still get out with Bitcoin.
Because Bitcoin is portable.
And that's why I continue to recommend, even with everything that I've said about Bitcoin, beware of it being a bubble.
Don't be a speculative investor in Bitcoin.
Beware of the Bitcoin mania and so on.
Even despite all of this, I still say that Bitcoin has a function as an escape, like an emergency escape currency.
And you could, I think, put about 5% of your assets in some kind of cryptocurrency such as Litecoin or Bitcoin or Zcash or something else.
And that seems reasonable.
Bitcoin has a function, and it's very good at doing that thing, which is extreme portability and an escape hatch currency.
You can get out with it.
But Bitcoin is not a safe place to avoid risk.
I hope that should be obvious at this point.
The last time I warned about Bitcoin, which was just a couple of weeks ago, It crashed almost 30% in the next...
Well, the crash started within 24 hours after that warning, and it crashed almost 30%, I think, within 72 hours or so.
Now, it has since recovered...
Let's see, right now it's at like 2,500-something.
It was much, much higher, and I think it crashed to like 22%.
2100 or something.
But anyway, it's moving with extreme volatility.
And the fact that Bitcoin can crash 30% in 24 hours or 50% in 24 hours, which it has done before, also shows you that the volatility is too high for those who are trying to avoid risk.
Remember, if your goal is risk aversion, Bitcoin is obviously mathematically a very bad choice for that function.
Again, Bitcoin has a function, has a role as an escape currency, but it is not a store of wealth.
And this is where people have it totally wrong.
This is where not only would I disagree with people who try to debate the other side of this, I would just say outright that they have no idea what they're talking about.
Bitcoin is not a store of value.
It is now a speculative online marketplace, really, a cryptocurrency market.
Rooted entirely in faith.
You know, we talk about the fiat currencies like the U.S. dollar being based on faith, but at least the U.S. dollar is accepted everywhere.
You know, everywhere around the world at the moment.
And yeah, it's devalued all the time by the central banks.
We get that.
But at least if you have dollars, you can trade dollars for all kinds of things almost anywhere.
But you can't walk into a grocery store and buy food with Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is only useful if you sell it For the most part.
And turn it into something that's closer to reality such as fiat currency dollars or gold or something like that.
So yeah, you can sell Bitcoin for dollars or you can sell Bitcoin for gold and then you can use the gold or the dollars to buy things, other things that you might need like land or food or ammunition or firearms or shelter, you know, a house, whatever.
But you can't typically...
You can't usually sell Bitcoin for those things directly unless you find somebody willing to trade with you, which is more like a barter situation.
If you can find somebody to give you gold in exchange for Bitcoin, and there are a few people who do that online, then you should do that.
In my opinion, that's a great choice.
Because you can convert something that's not real, which is Bitcoins, into something that is real and physical, which is gold coins that can't simply vanish in an instant.
So, most people going into Bitcoin right now are thinking that they're going to make money on Bitcoin.
They're going to sell high after they bought low.
This is what most people believe.
And history has shown us that when large numbers of people, or sheeple is a better term, believe that they're all going to get rich on something, A speculative valuation that keeps going higher and higher and higher that they are usually fools.
They usually end up getting burned.
They usually end up losing most of their investments.
I mean, look at the dot-com mania from the late 1990s to the crash, like 2000, 2001.
What I'm hearing today about Bitcoin from people is It's exactly the same as what I heard in the late 1990s.
And what I'm saying to people today about Bitcoin is exactly what I was telling people about the dot-com boom in the 1990s.
Watch out!
This is a bubble.
This is a speculative effort by people to try to buy low and sell high, and when the masses all attempt to do that at the same time, what they actually end up doing is buying high and selling low.
Because crowds are stupid.
This is what you need to understand.
If you're going to protect your wealth, you need to let go of the greed angle.
Stop thinking about how much money you can make off of this.
And instead, think about how are you going to not lose your money?
If you can convert all of your assets right now into a riskless format and lose nothing for the next 10 years, you will be way ahead of most people.
Because most people will lose big time.
And even people who invest in Bitcoin stand to lose almost everything because of the risk profile of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is not a risk-averse system.
It's more like going to Vegas.
And again, it has a role, right?
It has a role for getting out of dodge.
It's your escape hatch.
But if you're betting the farm on it, that is a foolish bet, because the risk is out of control.
You see, this is, a lot of people, they don't understand volatility, market volatility, or market risk.
All they see is the price going up and up and up, and at some point, the masses jump in.
They're convinced, well, if it's gone up this long, it must go up forever.
History has shown often people are buying at the peak of the bubble, right before it turns against them.
I mean, just look up tulip bulb mania for a great example of that.
Everybody thought tulip bulbs were going to be incredibly valuable, and they were all going to get rich buying tulip bulbs and trading them with each other for higher and higher valuations.
Of course, it was all just faith-based.
It was all just a speculative market.
It was the thing of the day.
This was centuries ago.
I don't remember what year it was, but I think it was back in the 17th century or something like that.
It was a while back.
And...
The way people are looking at Bitcoin today is exactly the same.
It's just a mania.
It's like, oh, we're all going to get rich buying Bitcoin.
I don't think so.
And that's my warning to people.
I'm trying to bring a sobering analysis to this so that people don't get hurt.
Gold will be there after Bitcoin is long gone.
This is something that's worth remembering.
Gold will be there.
Even after Bitcoin crashes and burns or becomes unpopular and everybody bails out of it and goes to the next better cryptocurrency or whatever the case may be, gold will exist far longer than Bitcoin or even the internet or even human civilization for that matter.
Gold is an element in the cosmos.
It will be around longer than humanity.
And it has been here essentially since the beginning of the universe.
So gold will outlast everything.
If you want to avoid risk, the answer is self-evident.
You buy gold.
And you let go of the idea, oh, that maybe you lost out on the uptick in Bitcoin.
If you're going to be driven by greed, if you're going to let greed make your investment decisions, then yeah, jump into Bitcoin, spin that roulette wheel, and hope you're lucky.
Because if you're wrong, you could lose everything.
Whereas, on the other hand, if you just go buy gold and silver, or hard assets like land, then you can sleep at night.
Because you know your gold isn't going to just suddenly disappear.
Even if there's a fire, you know, your gold coins melt, what do they melt into?
Gold bullion.
You still have gold.
You know, gold, it doesn't disappear.
Yeah, somebody can come and steal it.
But you have something to say about that.
You can control that.
You can hide it well.
You can defend it with a Glock.
You know, if someone tries to steal Bitcoin online, you can't do jack.
The Mt.
Gox people got all their Bitcoins stolen.
I mean, everybody who had an online wallet with Mt.
Gox had all their Bitcoins stolen overnight, and there's nothing they could do about it because it's not regulated.
We don't want it regulated, but they lost everything instantly overnight.
That can happen again.
I mean, Coinbase is stealing coins right now from people in Wyoming.
And they're a big popular online wallet, and they are engaged in what is essentially mass theft right now as well.
And people are still using Coinbase.
They have no idea the risk they're taking.
So if you truly understand risk, and you're trying to avoid risk, you will avoid Bitcoin for all except an emergency fund.
You know, like an escape fund, as I described earlier.
That is the proper use of something like Bitcoin right now.
But to look at it as a speculative investment is a very, very dangerous idea.
And you know, what's going to happen I know there's a lot of debate in the liberty community about this right now, and a lot of us who are all pro-liberty and we're all anti-central banks, some people are sort of falling on the pro-Bitcoin side of things, and other people are falling on the pro-gold side of things.
I am clearly pro-gold, because I understand the importance of avoiding risk.
But that's because I understand risk, and I feel sorry for those in this industry who are heavily promoting Bitcoin because they're going to get burned.
They're going to get burned bad at some point.
And, you know, reputations are going to get damaged.
When people get hurt by Bitcoin, it's going to be epic.
And by the way, there's no way to know how high Bitcoin could go.
You see, this is where I'm totally upfront and honest with you about this.
Could Bitcoin go to $10,000?
Absolutely it could.
Could Bitcoin go to $100,000?
It actually could, believe it or not.
If the central bank fiat currency systems start to crash, yes, Bitcoin could skyrocket.
But here's the problem.
How do you know when to get out?
What's your sign of when to sell?
Because Bitcoin by itself is useless.
You have to convert it to something.
You have to sell it in order to convert it to something that's useful.
Because not that many vendors accept Bitcoin yet.
Or maybe you think that Bitcoin could replace central bank currencies.
So if that's the case, then I admit, if that happens, then Bitcoin...
Well, look, I don't think that that's going to happen, but I will admit, if that were to happen, then its value might stay very high for a very long time.
But I think the reason that that is unlikely to happen is because the blockchain has problems.
The blockchain is getting larger and larger.
Transaction times are getting slower and slower and more expensive.
I mean, when I was trying to sell my Bitcoins for gold, During or right before the recent crash, the 30% crash, that has since had some correction.
But even then, when there wasn't a panicked sale, I had a very hard time getting my Bitcoin transactions to go through because the reward amount on the transactions is now more and more expensive.
Did you know the average transaction is now costing over $16?
Just to clear a Bitcoin purchase or sale, costing over $16 on average.
That's a far cry from the free that we all understood when we got into Bitcoin in the first place.
We thought, oh, you can send money for free.
It's instant and it's free, or essentially free.
And at that time, it was really like 25 cents or whatever it cost to process a Bitcoin transaction.
But now, it's expensive.
It's slow.
The blockchain ledger keeps getting larger and larger and larger.
And frankly, if you do the math on this, The more successful Bitcoin becomes in terms of public usability, the more exponentially large the blockchain ledger becomes to the point where it becomes very difficult to manage that.
Because every Bitcoin operation, every online wallet and so on has to have a complete copy of the entire blockchain ledger.
And at some point that becomes...
Very difficult.
I know storage is cheap.
I know computing power continues to increase, but the underlying structure of Bitcoin starts to have problems, and we're starting to see those right now.
And there are already discussions about changing Bitcoin so that it can have unlimited future mining instead of the limit of 21 million coins.
Well, wait a minute.
Part of the value of Bitcoin was the fact that it had built-in mathematical scarcity.
Right now, there are like 16.4 million coins out there, and there's only going to be 21 million ever, and that's it.
That's the limit.
And so each coin, once the 21 million is all mined out, then the scarcity is built in, and each individual coin will become more and more valuable.
That's the theory.
But if you then change the rules, which is what some of the Bitcoin mining companies are pushing for now, And allow unlimited long-term mining, then all of a sudden, it's just like the central bank counterfeiting currency.
Now you've got quantitative easing in the Bitcoin community, which is just the same as the central banks.
It's the same damn scam.
So if you start to see that kind of thing happen in the Bitcoin community, then you know it's just a scam.
At that point, it's a fraud.
So we'll have to watch and see and see where all of this goes.
Here's my best assessment on all of this.
And, you know, I have a background in computing technology.
I used to run a software company.
I founded a software company.
And I ran large-scale development projects.
And, you know, I'm engaged in Bitcoin mining.
And, you know, I'm a food scientist.
So I've got a few qualifications to chime in on this.
Here's my guess on what's going to happen.
I think that Bitcoin was a great first shot at a cryptocurrency.
It has been wildly successful.
The inventor of Bitcoin is truly an incredible genius.
No question about any of that.
And I have a couple of ideas of who that might be.
But Bitcoin will not be the long-term cryptocurrency that succeeds.
I think that other cryptocurrencies that have a better inherent design will become more popular in the long term.
I also think that governments will create their own cryptocurrencies.
And as governments do that, they will, in essence, eliminate many of the advantages of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency.
And some governments might even get behind cryptocurrencies that they can't control, such as peer-to-peer cryptocurrencies that are embraced by or endorsed by certain governments, like Russia in particular.
So, the world's governments and the world's central banks They will look at what's working from Bitcoin and they will borrow that and they will take it for themselves and build their own systems that either they can influence or control or perhaps just enjoy the efficiencies of payment systems and they will launch their own currencies.
I mean, there's already so much research being done right now by big banks like J.P. Morgan.
Chase, the Russian government, the Chinese government, they are all working on cryptocurrency systems that could be launched big.
There could be a launch.
Just let me give you an example.
China could say one day, just out of the blue, one day, we are launching the world's new gold-backed cryptocurrency because China has been accumulating a massive amount of gold.
What if China just said, Here's a new distributed peer-to-peer cryptocurrency that can always be exchanged for gold.
How huge would that be?
I could see people, everybody dumping Bitcoin and rushing into that.
No joke.
I mean, it could happen literally overnight.
So, you got to understand that Bitcoin, you know, everybody's focused on Bitcoin right now.
Bitcoin could be obsolete literally tomorrow.
Literally, because it's a cryptocurrency, which means that it could be obsolete by a better system, a better cryptocurrency that stands on the shoulders of Bitcoin.
And is the next big thing.
And that would just see everybody bailing out of Bitcoin.
And how are you going to bail out when everybody's bailing out at the same time?
You can't.
And this is why the people who bought gold are just going to be sitting there laughing in essence because they're like, hey, my gold is still gold.
It still has basically the same value.
I can still trade an ounce of gold for a cow or whatever or a battle rifle.
You know, it doesn't fluctuate that much.
Whereas Bitcoin could explode in value to $100,000, or it could just be wiped out to almost $0, depending on what happens.
That is risk, my friends.
And if you are trying to avoid risk, you want to avoid those dynamics.
That's my message.
I'm not anti-Bitcoin.
In fact, I'm pro-cryptocurrency, and have always been since the inception of it.
I'm anti-Central Bank.
I'm pro-cryptocurrency, but I'm also a realist.
I'm just blunt and honest with everybody about my assessment.
And my assessment is that a lot of people are going to get hurt by Bitcoin because they are approaching it from a speculative, greed-based point of view.
And that is not the correct way to store value or avoid risk.
And the big play for the next few years is to figure out how to not lose your money How do you not lose your assets?
How do you not lose your bank account, your savings account?
That's the real question.
And the answer to that is very, very clear.
You buy gold and silver.
You buy land.
You pay off your house, for example, if you haven't already.
You buy and you sit on things that outlast all of the chaos in the world.
That's the strategy that works.
It has worked throughout human history, for the most part.
I mean, I understand governments can seize your land.
I understand governments can confiscate gold.
I understand that they can ban firearms and so on.
But overall, these are things that outlast all of human history.
Even, for example, Jews escaping the Third Reich in World War II, what did they take with them?
Gold.
Diamonds, perhaps, if they had that.
They lost their homes.
They lost their land.
Some of them lost their family members, of course.
Some of them lost their lives.
But those who escaped early, who got out early, they brought with them gold.
Some of them came to New York and they rebuilt gold.
Their lives and established new beginnings just using gold to pay rent to get started, launch a business, work, earn something.
These are the things that really matter.
I have very little tolerance for get-rich-quick type of advocates out there who are like, this is the next big thing.
Jump in now.
You can make 10 times whatever.
See, to me, that is a very dangerous play.
Maybe that's just me because I work hard.
I've always been a hard worker my whole life.
I tend to be very financially conservative.
I don't use leveraged money to make bets on things.
To me, that's a dangerous thing.
And I'm looking out for your financial safety in all of this as well.
I want you to be safe.
I want you to not lose your money.
When all of this crap hits the fan, as is going to happen.
Bitcoin, high risk.
High risk situation.
Yeah, you might get lucky.
You might make 10 to 1, but only if you sell.
And how are you going to know when to sell?
You're not.
You're not going to know when to sell.
When is enough enough?
When is it high enough?
Because say it goes to 10,000, somebody else is out there saying, oh, it's going to go to 100,000.
So you're going to hold it.
You're going to hold it until the day it crashes, and you're going to lose everything.
That's the way it's going to end for most people, sadly.
So that's my take on it.
Hope you enjoy these analyses.
Yes, yes, yes.
I'll try to bring you more as I see it.
And mostly, you know, look, I just want to say I am...
I am pro-liberty.
I want everybody to live in a free world.
I hope cryptocurrencies succeed.
I hope the central banks become obsolete.
I hope that even these central governments that we have are radically reformed.
I would like to see society structured in a whole new way that is more decentralized, that is more peer-to-peer.
I would like to see liberty as a universal concept.
So that's ultimately what I'm aiming for.
So if you're listening to this and you disagree with my assessment on Bitcoin, I understand that.
We can debate these things all day.
But bottom line, if you and I both agree on these principles of liberty, then we're at least attempting to move people in the same direction.
I want to live in a world rooted in liberty and decentralization and free from government tyranny.
So that's my ultimate goal.
We might disagree on how to get there, but at least we're all looking at the same...
I appreciate your support.
Thank you for listening.
My name is Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, and this is healthrangerreport.com.
Learn more at healthrangerreport.com.
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