Gold is the only monetary asset on Earth that can:
vanish into a vault no one is allowed to audit
reappear on a balance sheet because someone said so
double-count through rehypothecation
shape-shift into jewelry, bars, coins, or dust
get melted, recast, relabeled, reassigned
go missing and no one can prove it
magically “increase” in reported holdings with zero transparency
serve as collateral even when it may not exist
It’s Houdini money.
Imagine running a global economy on something that can literally disappear without evidence and then reappear through paperwork.
Gold isn't “sound money.”
It’s sound mythology maintained by the few who benefit from the opacity.
Bitcoin didn’t just outcompete gold.
It revealed gold.
Empires love assets they can seize.
Cartels love assets that leave no trace.
Superpowers love assets they can hoard and lie about.
And governments love assets that require trust instead of proof.
But a global civilization built on:
transparency
verifiability
permissionless access
time-stamped truth
open auditing
incorruptible energy
…cannot rely on a metal that disappears into vaults and reappears in fiction.
There is no global ledger for gold.
No registry.
No shared accounting.
No proof-of-reserves.
No immutable record.
Every ounce of gold on Earth exists in a fog of:
private vaults
offshore holdings
undeclared stashes
melted-down bars
repurposed jewelry
counterfeit bars
bars swapped or filled with tungsten
gold that “disappeared” into governments
gold allegedly seized, but who knows
gold that changed hands without documentation
Nobody knows the total.
Nobody can know the total.
Gold’s “ledger” is whispers and paperwork.
The mining supply is known. The above-ground supply isn’t.
We can estimate mining output:
annual production
historic mining figures
industrial recovery rates
But above-ground gold moves like a shadow asset:
melted
recast
concealed
seized
stolen
buried
privately hoarded
It has no chain of custody.
The system relies on “trust-me bro” accounting
Central banks allegedly hold:
8,000 tons
3,000 tons
600 tons
…but these numbers are whatever the bank claims.
No public audits.
No transparency.
No verifiable cryptographic proof.
No global consensus.
Even the U.S. gold reserves at Fort Knox haven’t undergone a full audit in over 60 years.
We believe in gold holdings the same way medieval kings believed the priest when he said:
“The relics are genuine.”
It’s ceremony, not truth.
Gold can be double-counted — or claimed by multiple entities.
Gold has no UTXO set.
No unique identifier.
No global state.
If I loan a bar to a bank,
and the bank loans it to someone else,
and they use it as collateral for another loan…
We now have three people who all think they own the same bar.
Gold is rehypothecated constantly.
Just like fiat.
Gold is the opposite of transparent
It’s:
opaque
unverifiable
geographically siloed
permissioned
susceptible to seizure
easily counterfeited
expensive to move
impossible to audit globally
political rather than mathematical
It’s the perfect asset for empires and cartels —
the worst asset for an open, global, digital civilization.
Bitcoin exposed this truth
Bitcoin didn’t “replace” gold.
It revealed gold’s flaw:
If you cannot measure it,
you cannot trust it.
Bitcoin sits in the opposite camp:
every coin accounted for
every movement logged
every supply known to the satoshi
no double-counting
no ambiguity
no fog
no secrecy
no elite vaults
no trust required
It is the only asset in human history with a perfect ledger.
Was sittin’ on the toilet and it hit me…
Fiat works like this:
The banker takes a dump,
walks out of the bathroom—
and boom, a trillion new digits exist.
That’s not money.
That’s a load of crap.