I asked an agent that I think bitcoin and the dollar have a better relationship than bitcoin and gold. This is what was said.
Bitcoin’s recent divergence from gold and its loose co‑movement with the dollar don’t mean it has failed as a hard asset; they show it has become a different kind of hard asset. Gold today is driven mostly by central banks and conservative capital hedging against dollar weakness and geopolitical risk, so it tends to move in a classic “dollar down, gold up” pattern. Bitcoin, by contrast, is driven by ETFs, hedge funds, and tech‑aligned capital, so it trades as a high‑beta expression of global dollar liquidity and risk sentiment rather than as a simple mirror of the dollar.
Framed this way, BTC decoupling from gold while remaining tightly plugged into dollar financial plumbing is exactly what you would expect as both systems become more disciplined at the margin. Bitcoin’s supply schedule keeps hardening, institutional infrastructure deepens, and it earns a role as a free‑floating, mark‑to‑market benchmark for global liquidity. At the same time, episodes of higher real rates and tighter policy make dollar assets “less unsound” than in the zero‑rate era, so the main volatility shows up in relative prices and flows, not in a clean “fiat down, hard money up” chart. In that sense, the divergence from gold and the nuanced relationship to the dollar are part of a co‑evolution toward more market‑constrained money, not a refutation of the hard‑money thesis.
Bitcoin’s recent divergence from gold and its loose co‑movement with the dollar don’t mean it has failed as a hard asset; they show it has become a different kind of hard asset. Gold today is driven mostly by central banks and conservative capital hedging against dollar weakness and geopolitical risk, so it tends to move in a classic “dollar down, gold up” pattern. Bitcoin, by contrast, is driven by ETFs, hedge funds, and tech‑aligned capital, so it trades as a high‑beta expression of global dollar liquidity and risk sentiment rather than as a simple mirror of the dollar.
Framed this way, BTC decoupling from gold while remaining tightly plugged into dollar financial plumbing is exactly what you would expect as both systems become more disciplined at the margin. Bitcoin’s supply schedule keeps hardening, institutional infrastructure deepens, and it earns a role as a free‑floating, mark‑to‑market benchmark for global liquidity. At the same time, episodes of higher real rates and tighter policy make dollar assets “less unsound” than in the zero‑rate era, so the main volatility shows up in relative prices and flows, not in a clean “fiat down, hard money up” chart. In that sense, the divergence from gold and the nuanced relationship to the dollar are part of a co‑evolution toward more market‑constrained money, not a refutation of the hard‑money thesis.