Both bitcoin and gold have a specific role to play in investors’ portfolios and, as such, bitcoin won’t take over gold’s market capitalization, nor will gold make the flagship cryptocurrency irrelevant.
According to a note from Goldman Sachs analysts reported on by CoinDesk, both assets serve a different role in investors’ portfolios, with gold remaining a defensive play for investors and bitcoin being a more “risk-on” investment.
The analysts added that because of bitcoin’s volatility, their roles are different. They wrote:
In an environment of broadband dollar weakness and still very low and negative real rates we do not see either asset cannibalizing each other and see enough room for both.
The note, CoinDesk writes, is predominantly bullish on the precious metal’s trajectory for this year, and attributed gold’s poor performance last year to investors rotating into riskier asset classes, without elaborating on what role the cryptocurrency may have played.
As reported, analysts at JPMorgan have analyzed bitcoin’s “competition with gold” saying the cryptocurrency could “ compete more intensely with gold as an ‘alternative’ currency over the coming years given that millennials will become over time a more important component of investors’ universe.”
Goldman Sachs’ analysts, on the other hand, reportedly compared gold to non-precious metals such as copper and zinc, which have been seeing their prices move steadily upward since October. These metals have had a “pretty tight correlation” with bitcoin as “both act as risk on inflation hedges with appealing long term growth stories.”
The analysts added that cryptocurrencies are sensitive to sudden moves and influencer-driven price movements. As an example, they pointed to the price of XRP crashing after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced a lawsuit against Ripple over the sale of the token. The price of XRP has, however, been recovering over the last few weeks.
