Bitcoin will out-volatility gold and out-market-cap it, says author who wrote the book on it 📖

Saifedean Ammous, the author of the 2018 academic book "The Bitcoin Standard," said Bitcoin already functions as a medium of exchange and that the asset's volatility is likely to diminish as it surpasses the market capitalization of gold. In a Tuesday X post, Ammous wrote that Bitcoin (BTC) can serve as a medium of exchange as it becomes less volatile than gold while overtaking the largest precious metal by market cap. "Holding Bitcoin is using Bitcoin as money, and its lack of widespread use as a method of payment is no evidence against its monetization unfolding," Ammous added.

The comments were a response to a passage in Professor Lawrence H. White's book, "Better Money: Gold, Fiat, or Bitcoin?," which argued that Bitcoin's fixed supply makes it too volatile to serve as a medium of exchange. "With no supply response to demand swings, BTC's price is too volatile for people who want a reliable medium of exchange," White wrote in a Monday X post, referencing chapter six of his book. He added that the lack of supply response was the reason stablecoins have "eaten BTC's lunch transaction volume."

Other industry watchers have projected that Bitcoin would eventually surpass gold. In May 2025, Bitwise's head of European research, André Dragosch, told Cointelegraph that the firm's in-house prediction forecasts a $1 million Bitcoin price by 2029, which would bring Bitcoin's market capitalization in line with gold's. Bitcoin's current $1.6 trillion market capitalization would need to grow by at least 18-fold to surpass gold's near $29 trillion market cap and become the leading global asset.

In April 2025, Blockstream CEO Adam Back predicted Bitcoin will start rivaling gold's use cases as a monetary hedge, citing global financial instability and rising fiat inflation. Neither Ammous nor White disclosed any positions in $BTC at the time of their respective posts.