Craig Wright on gold, Bitcoin and hoarding empires

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What would you prefer: a gold standard or a Bitcoin standard?

“Neither,” said Dr. Craig Wright. 

In a new interview, Joel Dalais from the MetaNet ICU and myself had the chance to discuss gold, bitcoin and hoarding empires with Dr. Wright:

We automatically are reminded of the deceptive “digital gold” narrative of the BTC camp whenever we hear gold and Bitcoin together in one sentence.

“There is no correlation between bitcoin in any possible history and gold. (…) There is no way that it (gold) correlates with bitcoin. Ever,” Dr. Wright said.

We have covered why BTC is not digital gold for years already, yet many still buy into the false store of value and HODL propaganda. Even renown financial reports prove that BTC is not a hedge against market turmoil as one would expect from gold.

Dr. Wright’s opinion on gold—and I mean gold alone—is quite interesting though:

“The only reason to hold gold is people value the damn thing… Apart from a small level of jewelry and electronics, gold doesn’t really do much. You can’t eat gold if you’re hungry…”

“Gold sounds valuable, until you realize: what happens if society collapses? What happens if suddenly tomorrow productivity goes down by 50%? Then that gold doesn’t suddenly make you rich…”

“The only reason it (gold) existed was nobody had anything better at the time,” said Dr. Wright.

Craig Wright doesn’t seem to be impressed by gold at all. But he does wear it! In the video, you can see Dr. Wright showing his gold Rolex and his gold Harvard class ring. Dr. Wright does have a career history connected to gold though. He explained how he has been involved in audits before, including audits in the famous The Perth Mint.

He went on to elaborate what a hassle it actually is to audit gold vaults, because if the vault has a certain size, auditing all gold at once is not doable. So auditors go room by room, but if there is a day in between the audits, one cannot be sure the gold has not been moved from room to room already.

And not only that. Counting gold bars in vaults is the easy part but verifying whether the gold looking bars are actual gold bars is the problem.

“I have been involved with gold companies that had titanium rods in… we destructively audited a gold bar once, as in cut it in half. Well, we attempted to cut it in half. Gold is easy to cut in half, but when you hit a titanium rod it actually is rather hard to cut,” said Dr. Wright.

I remembered that Kevin Healy pointed us to quite an old but important video of Dr. Wright, in which gold hoarding empires were mentioned (time stamped):

So we used the chance to discuss gold hoarding empires with Dr. Wright, too.

“The reason they hoard gold is, they think it is wealth. Gold isn’t wealth. Money isn’t wealth,” said Dr. Wright referring to Adam Smith.

Dr. Wright went on to explain that people always make this error to think of money as wealth, while in reality, wealth is goods and services, the things and services we are creating. The economy. According to Dr. Wright, wealth is the economy, not the thing we use to measure it. Money is a measuring tool, not wealth itself.

But what is the difference between saving and hoarding?

According to Dr. Wright, saving means you have your money active as in trying to grow it. Growing it doesn’t happen by hoarding it though, it happens when you put the money to work, which essentially is putting it back into the economy somehow.

Hoarding on the other side has no goal in putting the hoarded money or hoarded assets back into the economy.

“Hoarding is an anti trade position,” Dr. Wright said.