Apologies in advance, it took me almost 6 months to share this panel with you!.. I’m quite embarrassed about that, it just fell between the cracks.
Back in June 2025, I moderated a panel at FreedomFest in Palm Springs, CA, with four fine men debating Bitcoin vs. Gold:
, Wolf von Laer, Ethan Peck, and Adam Trexler.
Fenigson began the discussion by saying Americans hold more Bitcoin than gold: 50 million hold Bitcoin versus 36.7 million for gold.
“That’s a very surprising fact,” she said. “Gold bugs normally think that Bitcoin is a scam, and Bitcoiners think that gold is a pet rock. But the truth might be more interesting than that . . . Bitcoin and gold are often seen as hedges against inflation, but they operate in very different ways.”
A good article was written about the panel on Streetwise Reports:
Streetwise Reports liked it so much that we have decided to summarize it for our readers.”
Quoting from the article:
Both Have Roles in New Financial System
Fenigson asked Frisby what he thought gold and Bitcoin’s roles were in the changing financial system over the next decade.
“We have an instinct for gold, for the beauty of the gold,” he acknowledged. “We’re attracted by its shine. So, there’s a famous quote: the oldest commercial instinct of the human race is for gold. And so that’s not going to change.”
However, America’s “embracing of Bitcoin is one of the few things that could actually save it and save the dollar,” he said.
“I sent a transaction of one sat (satoshi, a subunit of Bitcoin) the other day as a test, one sat. That would be 1/20th of” a British penny, he said. “I think it’s incredible that you can send a payment that small, and obviously, you can send a payment of billions of dollars without anyone’s permission. It’s an incredibly profound and exciting technology.”
She asked Peck about Bitcoin’s volatility. “If you’re going to hold Bitcoin for 40 years, why do you care if it has a 30% drawdown over a couple of months? It doesn’t matter. Bitcoin is the ultimate correction to time preferences. It reorients our fast-paced, immediate gratification world towards thinking of the long term.”
She asked von Laer how the two compare from a libertarian perspective in terms “promoting individual sovereignty and protecting against government overreach in the monetary policy?”
“First, I would say we all have to realize that whatever we’re doing with our money, if it’s cash, it’s gold, it’s Bitcoin, we’re taking a risk,” he noted. “The risk with the dollar being right now we have US$37 trillion of debt and US$120 trillion of dollars in unfunded liabilities.”
“There’s much more security involved” with Bitcoin, von Laer said. “You can basically think about Bitcoin as gold, but with a brain and Wi-Fi.”
Trexler was asked what could be done to make gold more usable for everyday transactions.
He said because of counterfeit currency being produced in China, the “coin is broken.”
“The question is, when will governments protect their citizens by adopting an appropriate coinage for the 21st century?”
Wrapping up the discussion, Frisby noted that a balanced portfolio with both gold and Bitcoin helps to “strip the volatility out of the Bitcoin.”
“My advice is for the reasons of the decline of fiat currency, for financial reasons, for political reasons, for moral reasons, and for philosophical reasons, own both,” he said.
Check out
’s post about the panel:
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Finally, a good short video about Gold’s recent spike:
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♥️ Efrat
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I was recently banned from Stripe, so I cannot have paid memberships on Substack… but there’s always another way!
