While gold hits a record price at $2,848 per ounce, more and more financial experts and professionals voice their preference for Bitcoin over gold. In a commentary to Livewire Markets, CEO and founder of the Nasdaq-listed tech company IREN Daniel Roberts said Bitcoin needs to reach at least a $900,000 price to reach gold in terms of market cap, and it will by 2030.

Roberts’ prediction

Daniel Roberts is no stranger to cryptocurrency. His company, IREN, is an Aussie enterprise providing data centers using renewable energy for Bitcoin mining, powering AI, and other ventures. In November 2024, amidst a powerful crypto rally, Roberts famously said that Bitcoin is “dirt cheap.”

Bitcoin is often dubbed a digital gold. Like a famous precious metal, it is scarce and is seen as a safe haven in turbulent economic conditions (the pandemic-era rise of crypto demonstrated it well). 

Roberts uses gold metrics to express his views on the future of the BTC value. He believes that Bitcoin, which is increasingly viewed as a safe haven asset similar to gold or even better than gold, its market cap should quickly get by the market cap of gold. Roberts is sure that it will happen by 2030.

Given that the gold market cap is $19.3 trillion while the Bitcoin market cap is $1.95 trillion, Bitcoin needs a 10x price increase to reach parity. If the BTC price crosses the $1,000,000 mark, Bitcoin gets bigger than gold in terms of market capitalization. Roberts concludes that one million per unit by 2030 won’t be surprising for him. He cites ETF traction and high-profile purchases of Bitcoin by institutional investors as contributing factors to the speedy growth of the BTC price. 

It’s worth noting that by 2030, the gold market cap may gain substantial extra. In the last five years, the price of gold has grown by over 80%. Following the logic of Roberts, it may mean that by 2030, Bitcoin should gain even more than one million to reach gold parity or probably, the Bitcoin market cap will need more time to eclipse the one of gold.

Roberts proceeds to explain: 

“The easiest way to conceptualize the value of bitcoin is to think about it as gold 2.0. We live in a world where digital and social networks have disrupted their physical equivalents. If you compare bitcoin and gold, it’s like digital versus analog, Blockbuster versus Netflix. Bitcoin’s better at being gold than gold is. It’s scarcer, easier to transfer, and easier to divide. So, all those characteristics that give gold value, bitcoin is objectively better at.”

Bitcoin vs gold

Roberts is far from being the first to paint Bitcoin as the “better gold.” Many other professionals and experts from the crypto community and the broader financial sector claim they prefer Bitcoin to gold, and the temporary divergence between rising gold and declining Bitcoin doesn’t change it.

Following the start of the new stage of the U.S. trade war against China, investors flocked to assets they saw as a haven, and gold turned out to be one of the preferred assets. On Feb. 5, its price reached a new historical maximum at over $2.8 thousand per ounce, while Bitcoin was two days deep in a correction triggered by the same imposed tariffs. 

On Feb. 2, 2025, in an interview with Bloomberg, Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood admitted that Bitcoin is a new asset class, a market leader, and a new global monetary system. 

Wood added that her mentor economist Art Laffer said back in 2015 that Bitcoin is what he has been waiting for since 1971 when the U.S. government closed the gold window.

In 2023, Wood claimed that Bitcoin “hands down is better than gold” and called it a hedge against inflation and deflation. She said that the younger generation would prefer to hold Bitcoin rather than gold, as Bitcoin is a new asset not associated with institutions as much as gold.

A television personality and a billionaire businessman Mark Cuban told Wired that Bitcoin is similar to gold as both are seen as a hedge against economic crises. He added that Bitcoin is a great store of value. “People look at bitcoin as a better version of gold, and I agree with that,” said Cuban.

Last year, Jerome Powell, who has been a Fed chair since 2018, said that Bitcoin is a virtual gold, and it’s not a competitor of the American dollar but a competitor of gold.

Other high-profile proponents of the idea that Bitcoin is better than gold (mostly for all the same reasons mentioned above) include Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, Pantera Capital founder Dan Morehead, Bitwise CIO Matthew Hougan, and others.