In recent times, analysts and other financial experts have predicted that a recession may hit soon. Hence, some investors may be concerned with the possibility of this happening. Therefore, they are looking for ways to push their wealth to more stable investment options.

A typical move in this time is to invest in gold which historically is known to serve as a hedge against inflation and stock volatility. You can visit Kingold Jewelry if you would like to learn more about your options when it comes to gold investments.

However, while this has been a great and efficient method in previous years, there is a newer option that is challenging gold as the major safe-haven investment option.

In 2009, the world witnessed the arrival of Bitcoin, ushering us into an era of cryptocurrencies. As the world’s number one cryptocurrency, this coin has several features of a regular currency. However, it also has other peculiar characteristics that make people consider it to be a possible haven.

Due to this, most people are now torn between the older trusted gold investment and the newer Bitcoin investments. Hence, in this article, we will be discussing these two choices to help you decide which best suits your need. But first, let us quickly consider them individually before we go ahead to compare them.

Gold

For a long time, this metal has been considered a haven. It is quite valuable in several industries like electronics and jewelry. Also, it is quite scarce with a supply that is relatively low when compared to its demand.

Unlike shares that can be issued by companies or money that can be printed by federal banks, gold has to be dug out of the ground before it can be processed.

This asset also has a negative correlation with other assets such as stocks and currencies. These factors and many more are some of the major reasons why it has historically been considered a safe investment option.

Here Comes Bitcoin

Gold may have had the spot as the haven investment for a long time, but in 2009, Bitcoin was launched and is now challenging this spot with the king of metals. This may be because it has some properties that gold has which has made some persons even go ahead and refer to it as “digital gold”.

In 2017, a Bitcoin was priced higher than a troy of our beloved king of metals. This soon led people to start considering this newcomer as a better path to tread. But is this the case? Let us compare both to find out.

Comparing Bitcoin vs. Gold

1. Safety, Legality, and Transparency

These are three important things to consider when comparing these two investment options. Gold has been around for a long time; hence it has an established perfect market system that. Therefore, it is almost impossible to corrupt it or pass off a fake as an original.

The same can be said about Bitcoin since it has an encrypted and decentralized system with complicated algorithms. Despite this, it lacks proper infrastructure that can completely ensure safety.

Take the story of Mt. Gox for instance. You can visit here to read about this story. The disaster of this story is enough for investors to be wary of this path. In this story, about 456 million dollars of Bitcoin became missing.

Years afterward, the legality of this situation is yet to be resolved. Legally, consequences for situations like these are few since tracking the cryptocurrency still lacks some efficiency.

2. Liquidity

Both investment markets are very liquid and can easily get exchanged for fiat currency in no time.

3. Volatility

A major concern of investors of this cryptocurrency is the asset’s volatility. To get a clear picture of how volatile the market is, you simply need to check its price history in the past 2 years. As of early 2018, one Bitcoin was priced at 20,000 US dollars, however, a year after; the price had gone down to about 4,000 dollars per coin and hovered on this price.

Besides the general volatility of this asset, the asset has historically shown that it is subjected to the news and market whims. This is particularly true as of 2017 where a boom in the market swept several cryptocurrencies to very high prices.

Cryptocurrency news made investors decide rather quickly and the asset’s price rapidly went up and down. In recent times, several cryptocurrencies launched claiming to be more stable than Bitcoin. These stablecoins may be a better option if you want a digital currency investment that is not as volatile as Bitcoin. You can visit https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/stablecoin.asp to learn more about stablecoins.

However, if we are to use volatility as the chief factor of deciding the better choice between gold and the number one cryptocurrency, then the obvious choice will be the precious metal.

This is because gold is not half as volatile as the latter, serves as a hedge over inflation, and would always be valuable regardless of how bad the economy is hit.

4. Baseline Value

Gold has been used historically in several ways, from being used to make luxury items such as jewelry to being used in several industries such as electronics, dentistry, and so on.

Our star cryptocurrency also has a great baseline value since it is also the tool through which blockchain technology was ushered in.

Furthermore, several people globally do not have access to some traditional finance methods such as credit and banking infrastructure. Yet, with this cryptocurrency, they can send and get value globally for a very little fee.

Hence, both options offer enough baseline value which makes them viable investments choices.

5. Rarity

Both of these assets are rare. From what we know from the Bitcoin halving, there will be just 21 million of these coins in circulation by 2140.

We know the exact figure of coins that exists, however, no one knows when all the gold on earth will be mined out of the ground. Some people speculate that gold can be gotten from asteroids; some companies are even looking into this futuristically.

If this is possible, then there is the chance that our star cryptocurrency may end up being rarer than gold.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, the choice to be made is solely that of the investor. However, before you decide, properly weigh all that has been discussed in this article.