At an event Wednesday, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell called Bitcoin a rival not to the U.S. dollar but rather gold—though not in the sense of BTC similarly being a store of value.

“Bitcoin is not a competitor for the dollar, it’s really a competitor for gold,” Powell said in a sit-down interview with journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times DealBook Summit in New York.

When asked about Bitcoin and how it might reflect people’s faith or lack thereof in the United States dollar or the Federal Reserve itself, Powell commented, “I don’t think that’s how people think about it.” He continued to say that Bitcoin is used as a speculative asset and that he thinks it’s too volatile to be a store of value, adding, “It’s like gold, only it’s virtual, it’s digital.”

Powell’s commentary quickly circulated around the crypto community on X (formerly known as Twitter), leading to direct comparisons of the gold and Bitcoin market caps. 

Bitcoin jumped more than 2% in the hours that followed Powell’s talk, breaking $99,000 and pushing towards its all-time high of $99,645 as recorded by CoinGecko in late November. The momentum has cooled since, however, with BTC currently priced at $98,500 as of this writing.

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Author: Logan Hitchcock