Over the past year, gold prices have risen from $3,400 to $4,330, an increase of 28%, outperforming Bitcoin by more than 70 percentage points. During the same period, Bitcoin fell from $117,000 to $65,000, a decline of 44%, a disappointing performance.
Looking at a longer time frame, holding Bitcoin over the past three years has even yielded a few percentage points less than gold. Bitcoin hit an all-time high of $126,200 on October 6, 2025, but has since fallen 48%. Gold, on the other hand, set a record on January 28, 2026, with spot prices surging to $5,589 per ounce, nominally higher than the inflation-adjusted peak of 1980. Although it has since pulled back, gold has not given up its year-over-year gains, while Bitcoin has nearly halved.
A dollar invested in gold a year ago is now worth about $1.28, while a dollar invested in Bitcoin is worth only about $0.55. The metal once expected to replace gold remains strong.
Famous investor Michael Burry said in February: "Bitcoin has proven to be a purely speculative asset, not a hedge against currency devaluation like gold and other precious metals." At that time, Bitcoin was trading near $77,000, and has since fallen a further 16%.
Central banks have also not been absent from the gold buying spree. In 2025, global central banks added 863 tonnes of gold reserves, a slower pace than the previous year but still at historical highs. Gold ETF investors have also turned around, with holdings shifting from a small net outflow in 2024 to a net inflow of over 800 tonnes in 2025.
On the other side, the Bitcoin community is divided. Michael Saylor's Strategy has sold Bitcoin for the first time since 2022; critics of Bitcoin Core v30 have proposed a hard fork of the blockchain and a change to the proof-of-work algorithm; and Coldcard, the most popular Bitcoin-specific hardware wallet, has suffered a catastrophic vulnerability.
Of course, there is always another side to the story. Bitcoin outperformed gold by a wide margin in the 2010s, but over the last 12 and 36 months, gold has not only beaten Bitcoin but has led by 70 percentage points. The so-called "digital gold" now exists only in imagination.
