An ex-Goldman Sachs trader says investors with deep pockets are buying both Bitcoin (BTC) and gold as stores of value.
In an interview with Kitco News, DrawBridge Lending CEO Jason Urban says he’s now witnessing big investors betting on gold and Bitcoin at an equal pace.
“As someone dealing in the institutional space, the same people that I see buying gold and other precious metals are also buying Bitcoin and they’re doing it simultaneously and they’re doing it in equal amounts currently.”
A changing economic climate is triggering new investments in both assets, according to Urban. He says these types of defensive assets serve as leverage amid the financial volatility brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.
“I take the defensive stance because what we’re currently seeing is really truly unprecedented and we haven’t gotten completely through the snake so to speak… I like traditional hedges against inflation like precious metals gold, silver, but I also like the new alternatives like Bitcoin and other digital assets.”
He also explains why he places Bitcoin and gold in the same asset class category.
“I think that the biggest thing is to look at it as a fixed finite supply similar to gold. Its scarcity is similar and so because of that, there isn’t a party or a government actively working to devaluate.
With the dollar, if you just held cash in your bank account, there’s always the inflationary specter that the government starts to print more money, but there is no government printing more gold, and there definitely is no government printing more Bitcoin.”
Urban acknowledges that, while the assets share many similarities, the king coin does experience a greater amount of volatility in its price. However, Urban contends that this Bitcoin feature isn’t necessarily a disadvantage.
“The store of wealth factor, it works kind of, in both ways, right so, yes, it can certainly decrease, but it can certainly increase as well and so if you normalize that and look at just the traditional characteristics of that asset in terms of a fixed finite supply, it certainly has a lot of the same characteristics as gold.
Being more volatile is one of the areas where it deviates, but if it was exactly like gold, there would be no need to hold both gold and Bitcoin.”