Ray Dalio picked an interesting week to trash bitcoin.
The Bridgewater Associates founder said on the popular All-In Podcast on Tuesday that investors should stop comparing bitcoin to gold, arguing that the largest cryptocurrency lacks central bank support, has no privacy, and faces long-term threats from quantum computing.
"There is only one gold," Dalio said. "Gold is the most established money" and the second-largest reserve currency held by central banks.
The timing undermined the thesis, however. On the day Dalio made those comments, gold dropped $168 to $5,128, a 3% decline, while bitcoin fell just 0.7% to $68,700. Five days into the U.S.-Iran war, the asset Dalio prefers was getting hit harder by exactly the kind of crisis he says it's supposed to protect against.
The decoupling isn't new. Bitcoin and gold moved together from July through early October, until the broader crypto crash in October wiped out $20 billion in leveraged positions. Since then the two assets have gone in opposite directions. Bitcoin is down over 45% from its October peak. Gold rallied 30% to over $5,100 in the same period.
Gold spiked on Saturday's initial strikes, then gave back those gains as the conflict widened and oil disruption became the dominant concern. Bitcoin sold off on Saturday, bounced on Sunday after Iran supreme leader Khamenei's death, got rejected at $70,000 on Tuesday, and has since settled in the mid-$67,000s.
That shows neither asset has fully operated as a safe haven this week. Both have been volatile. Bitcoin has just been less volatile, which isn't the outcome Dalio's framework predicts.
Dalio's specific criticisms aren't new either. He flagged bitcoin's transparency, noting that "any transaction can be monitored and directly, perhaps, controlled." He questioned whether central banks would ever accumulate an asset that runs on a public ledger. And he raised quantum computing as a longer-term existential risk.
He's not entirely bearish. Dalio holds roughly 1% of his portfolio in bitcoin for diversification and recommended a 15% allocation to bitcoin or gold in July, calling it the "best return-to-risk ratio" given America's debt trajectory.
Dalio warned last month that the "World Order" led by the U.S. had "broken down" and that investors needed to rethink how they protect wealth. Whether gold is still the only prescription is the part the market is actively debating, and this week's price action hasn't made his case any easier to make.
