#1537 Saifedean Ammous | Will Bitcoin Replace Gold & The Dollar?!

Unknown Source April 24, 2025 70 min
artificial-intelligence investment startup
🎧 Listen to Original
56 Companies
105 Key Quotes
3 Topics
2 Insights

🎯 Summary

Podcast Summary: #1537 Saifedean Ammous | Will Bitcoin Replace Gold & The Dollar?!

This 70-minute episode of the Pomp Podcast features economist and author Saifedean Ammous discussing the current state of global finance, the trajectory of Bitcoin as a potential global reserve asset, and its competition with both the US Dollar and Gold.

1. Focus Area

The discussion centers on Monetary Economics and Bitcoin Adoption. Key themes include:

  • The potential transition from the US Dollar standard to a Bitcoin standard.
  • The role and limitations of stablecoins (like USDT) in the current financial landscape.
  • A comparative analysis of Bitcoin versus Gold as monetary assets.
  • The impact of institutional adoption (ETFs) on Bitcoin’s core ethos.

2. Key Technical Insights

  • Monetary Asset Competition: Bitcoin competes primarily with the total market cap of monetary assets, estimated by Ammous to be around $300 trillion (including fiat cash balances, bonds, gold, etc.). Bitcoin’s current $2 trillion market cap suggests it still has a long runway to capture this monetary premium.
  • Gold Verification Difficulty: A major technical hurdle for gold as a modern monetary asset is the difficulty of verifying its purity across borders without physically melting down large bars, contrasting sharply with Bitcoin’s easy, trustless verification via running a full node.
  • On-Chain vs. Off-Chain Scaling: Ammous argues that Bitcoin does not require every transaction to be on-chain for security. Decentralization is maintained as long as the supply cannot be changed and censorship is prevented, allowing for scaling solutions to handle the bulk of daily transactions.

3. Market/Investment Angle

  • Bitcoin’s Long-Term Trajectory: Despite recent sideways movement, Ammous remains highly bullish, believing Bitcoin’s appreciation as a superior form of money is inevitable as people witness their dollar-denominated cash balances erode.
  • Stablecoins as a Dollar Buffer (Not a Bitcoin Threat): Stablecoins primarily serve to upgrade users from weaker local fiat currencies to the US Dollar standard (via Treasuries). While this increases dollar demand slightly, it’s not enough to significantly challenge the dollar’s massive capitalization and does not fundamentally alter the long-term thesis for Bitcoin’s appreciation.
  • Gold’s Monetary Weakness: Ammous is skeptical of gold’s sustained rally because its increasing use in industrial applications effectively reduces its liquid monetary stockpile, making it more inflationary as a monetary asset over the long term compared to Bitcoin.

4. Notable Companies/People

  • Saifedean Ammous: Author of The Bitcoin Standard, arguing for Bitcoin as the inevitable global monetary standard.
  • Larry Fink (BlackRock CEO): Mentioned humorously as an effective, albeit unexpected, Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) for Bitcoin due to the success of the spot Bitcoin ETFs.
  • Tether (USDT): Highlighted as an incredibly efficient entity ($13B profit on ~100 staff) facilitating global access to dollar-backed assets, though ultimately competing with other fiat, not Bitcoin directly.
  • MicroStrategy & El Salvador: Cited as early adopters whose actions have not yet triggered the expected wave of corporate or sovereign adoption.

5. Regulatory/Policy Discussion

  • US Government Strategy: The current US administration appears focused on using Bitcoin (e.g., through strategic reserve purchases) to bolster dollar hegemony, rather than accepting Bitcoin as a true alternative. Ammous views the dollar and Bitcoin as a zero-sum game where only one can win.
  • Central Bank Transition: Ammous suggests central banks might only seriously consider Bitcoin after attempting to operationalize a gold standard internationally, realizing the extreme logistical and verification costs involved, which would then make Bitcoin’s digital properties appealing.

6. Future Implications

The conversation suggests that while institutional adoption via ETFs is a net positive for liquidity and demand, the ultimate shift to a Bitcoin standard is a slow, multi-year process driven by the fundamental failure of fiat currencies to maintain value. The path forward involves increased familiarity with digital assets (potentially via stablecoins) leading users to eventually recognize Bitcoin’s superior monetary properties.

7. Target Audience

This episode is highly valuable for Crypto/Web3 Professionals, Institutional Investors, and Macro Economists interested in the long-term monetary competition between digital assets, fiat currencies, and traditional stores of value like gold.

🏢 Companies Mentioned

The Art âś… unknown
Like Americans âś… unknown
Chinese Communist Party âś… unknown
Gordon Chang âś… unknown
Republican Party âś… unknown
Is China âś… unknown
World War II âś… unknown
The Chinese âś… unknown
Social Security âś… unknown
Lyn Alden âś… unknown
Oval Office âś… unknown
Like I âś… unknown
America First âś… unknown
Donald Trump âś… unknown
The United States âś… unknown

đź’¬ Key Insights

"This is basically from my perspective as an Austrian economist. This is what Mises called the calculation problem. The reason that economic central planning doesn't work is that because you don't have property rights, the central planner is unable to figure out the correct allocation of resources because he has no possibility of allocating things rationally because there are no prices."
Impact Score: 10
"That's been the case because of China's growing industrialization and the US's deindustrialization, which is driven by the fact that the US has a money printer that makes it not so useful to get real productive business in the US because you could just go to the money printer."
Impact Score: 10
"I know as a Bitcoiner, I think we should—we should—we should notice the parallels here because people have been saying China is about to collapse for all of my life. You know, all my life I'm hearing people saying, "China is an authoritarian, repressive communist regime, and it's all smoke and mirrors, all of their statistics are cooked up, and it's all going to collapse." And on the contrary, just like with Bitcoin, you know, it's not just that it hasn't collapsed, it's also gone up enormously."
Impact Score: 10
"When you see these tariffs getting put in place, it seems like that has kicked off some of the gold buying, that has kicked off some of the maybe conversations from foreign countries saying, 'Okay, is the US trying to isolate China? Is China trying to isolate the US? Whose side am I on? Is there BRICS coming together and they want to create a currency?'"
Impact Score: 10
"It escalates from trade tensions into political tensions, and it can escalate into military tensions. And this is how World War II escalated."
Impact Score: 10
"Tariffs are essentially a punishment by the government to its own people, primarily."
Impact Score: 10

đź“Š Topics

#artificialintelligence 80 #investment 10 #startup 1

🧠 Key Takeaways

đź’ˇ notice the parallels here because people have been saying China is about to collapse for all of my life
đź’ˇ use tariffs," whatever

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Generated: October 05, 2025 at 10:12 PM