There has been a lot of attention on Bitcoin over the past decade. Do you think this has taken attention away from gold and silver? How has the Bitcoin market affected gold and silver’s place in the world?

Not at all. Bitcoin is a gift to the gold story. It widens the audience for it. It’s the same story. They have the same enemies and the same friends. It’s just a shame you have some of the hard core gold bugs that refuse to attribute value to anything that is not tangible, as though the internet itself never produced an intangible asset. But humans are humans. On the crypto side you have the maximalists who believe crypto will destroy everything traditional. They remind me of the internet maximalists back in the nineties who thought of mining as part of an old economy that need not exist now that we had the internet. So they put off a lot of gold bugs because they are not that smart to begin with. A lot of them are hung up on the idea that bitcoin is not tangible, or that anyone can create a cryptocurrency since it’s just code (so they even call it ‘fiat’), or that it doesn’t satisfy Ludwig von Mises’s regression theorem, or that gold is better money, and so on.

All of these are misguided criticisms that puts them at odds with the crypto entrepreneurs, but not all of them are hardcore hard asset types. The Austrians themselves are divided over whether to place relevance on the fact that bitcoin had an original value as a commodity or not, and regardless that Walter Block answered this question by explaining what Mises really meant about the regression theorem. But a lot of gold bugs remember they are not necessarily all in the same political sphere. Some of them are neocons, minarchists, and even communists.

I now see four worthy and sounder opponents for government fiat currencies, including the US dollar: gold, silver, bitcoin and monero. The four amigos, I call them. They move together and they lead the commodity complex because as you know commodity cycles are largely monetary.