Gold has rallied 28% over the past year from $3,400 to $4,330, outperforming digital rival BTC by over 70 percentage points.
Over the same time period, BTC has suffered an embarrassing 44% decline from $117,000 to $65,000.
In fact, across the past three years, owning so-called “digital gold” instead of the real thing would have returned a couple fewer percentage points despite 36 months of patience.
BTC has crashed off a financial peak, not just a psychological one. It hit an all-time high near $126,200 on October 6, 2025 but has since declined 48%.
Gold achieved its own record shortly after. Spot prices surged to $5,589 per ounce on January 28, 2026, a nominal high that also sat well above the metal’s inflation-adjusted 1980 peak.
The precious metal has since pulled back from that spike, but it never came close to giving up its year-over-year gain. BTC, in stark contrast, halved.
Boomer gold beats BTC
Evangelists have spent a decade comparing BTC to a global store of value. Its performance over the past few years has certainly stalled that pitch.
The comparison is nowhere close to a financial reality over the past year. Indeed, a dollar saved in gold a year ago is worth about $1.28 today. A dollar saved in BTC is worth about $0.55.
The metal BTC was supposed to dethrone maintained its strength.
Read more: Every time Michael Saylor said he’d never sell bitcoin
Michael Burry wrote in February, “BTC has been exposed as a purely speculative asset, and is not near the debasement trade hedge that gold and other precious metals are.”
BTC traded near $77,000 that day, already down sharply from its October peak, and it’s fallen another 16% since.
Central banks didn’t sit the trade out. They added 863 tonnes of gold to sovereign reserves in 2025, a historically elevated total albeit a slower pace than the prior year.
None of those purchases flowed into BTC, whose loudest institutional champions had long argued central banks would eventually buy it in the same way.
Gold ETF investors reversed course too. Holdings swung from a small net outflow in 2024 to inflows of more than 800 tonnes in 2025, per the World Gold Council.
Crypto investors used to celebrate that type of demand shift when capital rotated into BTC ETFs, not gold ETFs.
While gold sat in vaults and preserved its value, the BTC community fractured. Michael Saylor’s Strategy sold BTC for the first time since 2022 while critics of Bitcoin Core v30 proposed a hard fork of the blockchain and a proof-of-work change.
Coldcard, the most popular BTC-only hardware wallet, experienced a catastrophic bug.
Read more: Bitcoin outperforms gold as Iran war shakes ‘safe-haven’ trade
As usual, there are two sides to every story. BTC has had shorter stretches and prior time periods when it outpaced its rival. Certainly since its formative years in the 2010s, BTC has far outperformed gold.
Nevertheless, over the past 12 and 36 months that matter most to anyone who bought either asset recently, gold hasn’t just beaten BTC but trounced it by 70 percentage points.
“Digital gold” now describes what BTC was supposed to be, not what it actually accomplished.
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