The 'Bitcoin is digital gold' thesis predicts that in a high-inflation regime BTC should rally alongside or instead of gold, since both are scarce non-sovereign assets. The data since 2024 partially supports the thesis and partially complicates it. Both assets rallied meaningfully. Neither tracked headline CPI cleanly. The rolling correlation between them flipped sign three times in 18 months.
What actually drove each
Gold's rally is best explained by central-bank reserve diversification and the real-rate compression cycle. Bitcoin's rally is best explained by the spot-ETF approval flow plus the halving supply cut. The two stories share a macro backdrop but the proximate causes are different. That difference shows up in correlation: BTC-Gold rolling 30-day correlation has run between -0.3 and +0.6 over the last 18 months. Neither pole is informative on its own.
What the inflation-hedge claim needs to actually hold
- A clear positive beta to surprise inflation (above consensus) over multi-quarter windows.
- A negative or zero beta to growth shocks (otherwise it's just a risk asset).
- A negative beta to real yields (otherwise it's just a duration trade in disguise).
Where each asset stands on those tests
Gold has historically passed all three tests over multi-year windows, with significant noise inside the window. Bitcoin passes the first only intermittently, fails the second (it correlates positively with risk assets in stress regimes), and the data on the third is insufficient. The honest read: both can rally in a money-supply expansion regime; only gold has the structural payoff profile of an inflation hedge in the academic sense.