2018 - 2030: The grand battle between bitcoin, precious metals and fiat currency

I first posted this on r/bitcoin (https://redd.it/7vczec)

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I have seen things. Don't ask me how. My dreams can be cryptic.

The destruction of fiat has already begun in earnest, but we're only in the 1st inning. The next 10 years will be characterized by the destruction of the USD, and the rise of the Chinese yuan backed by gold.

Gold and crypto are the two twin pillars that will destroy fiat. Thanks to crypto we're looking at a resurfacing of a global consciousness and desire for a non-state backed currency, harkening back to the days of a gold-backed money supply. Throughout history, empires have risen and fallen. The strongest empire's currency has always been the choice reserve currency of that era, but as an empire grows complacent and the government officials decadent, so does the temptation to debase their currency. The privilege of being the reserve currency globally gives them a sunset period of 20-40 years as the inevitable decline happens. It all began when Nixon took the USD off the gold standard.

Both China and Russia has been quietly accumulating gold over the past 10 years, restricting exports and increasing imports of gold. China is the world's largest oil importer and is in the process of switching over from paying for oil in USD to yuan, and redeemable into gold. The ramifications are massive. Increasingly the world is turning back on the US and its currency.

China is clamping down on cryptocurrency heavily as it interferes with their grand plan: they plan to shock the world in 2019 by announcing that they will go back to a partial gold-backed standard. Not fully-backed due to constraints in monetary policy advised by their Chinese economists, but sufficiently so such that the world gains confidence in the yuan and central banks globally begin selling their USD in earnest from the current 60%+ weighting, demoting it to a 30%+ weighting in favour of yuan as it dawns on them the USD might have just lost its reserve currency status. In this chaos, as we see across all regime changes, central banks begin buying gold in earnest. Other countries respond by backing their currency with gold as well. China becomes the new global superpower.

Thanks to this, the gold price will move to all-time highs and start trading above $2k in 2019. This will see the beginning of a gold rush we've never seen before. Old and institutional money begins to pour into precious metals; new and speculative money pours into cryptos. Cryptos enter into a final blow-off-top a year later not unlike the 2000 tech top in 2020. Bitcoin crashes 70% from $1m to $300K. As this happens, the whole world goes all-in into gold and yuan as the new safe havens as this is simultaneously accompanied by a major sell-off across both equities and bond markets. The rout will not stop till the mid 2020s. Gold is now trading at $7k/oz and silver at $200/oz. In fact, gold, as is most asset classes, are no longer quoted in USD but yuan. Africa begins to wield significant influence in the global political arena with South Africa leading the charge, due to their massive gold holdings and gold mines.

The year is 2025. In the depths of a recession even more severe than the one we saw in 2009, the US government reveals they have been accumulating bitcoin since 2018, and have built a sizeable position of 500,000 BTC (equivalent to $250b with BTC trading at $500k). This sparks the re-birth of a new bitcoin bull run as the other central banks announces they too, now hold some BTC. Many central banks, especially the resource-poor countries who never saw the rebirth of gold coming, begin accumulating BTC as well. Many now fear Russia and China's dominance in the gold market. Despite gold being a decentralized store of wealth, the natural geographical distribution has made many other resource-poor countries bitter, and an unspoken alliance began taking shape as central banks secretly accumulate bitcoin. Countries begin to publicly denounce gold, even as gold ownership is quickly being transferred into the blockchain. Gold prices fall after entering a blow-off top in 2027.

Bitcoin begins to climb until it reaches a "demand equilibrium" with gold. By 2030, bitcoin is valued at $2m+ and represents a significant percentage of the global money supply and gold has fallen to $4k/oz. By the 2030s+ the world has transitioned to a fiat system that is completely transparent. All countries' reserves in both bitcoin and gold are publicly trackable on the blockchain. While fiat continues to live on, governments in the aftermath of the early 2020s recession now have learnt fiscal prudence and bond yields actually reflect market-priced default risk depending on a country's money supply vis a vis the value of the bitcoin and gold their central bank holds.

The economy never really recovered from the recession in the 2020s. Artificial intelligence had taken over most of the economy's jobs, and the wealth inequality continued to widen as more and more wealth accrued to owners of capital. The crash in the equity markets at the turn of the decade had also wiped out a generation's savings and therefore willingness to spend - the millennial investors who had gleefully piled into FAANGs as everyone turned euphoric into the last days of the stock market bubble. Deflation began to set in as the boomers started dying in record numbers, and consumer spending ground to a halt as nobody except the elites and the crypto-rich had any money to spend. By the late 2020s governments realized that a form of universal basic income was necessary or the economy would never recover, but a redistribution of wealth was not going to be possible. Countries came together and decided that a new UBI currency would be created, in direct proportion to the amount of bitcoin and gold each country owned. With every single individual having their own unique identity stored on the blockchain, this was easy and transparent to implement. This ultimately paved the way for a global common currency in 2030. Gold began to lose its shine.

By the mid 2030s, we entered a golden era for the human race as the wealth inequality came back down to levels unseen in the past 500 years. Productivity reached a new high, assisted by mature technologies that first appeared in the 2010s. Significant life extension, space exploration, nanotechnology, then the uploading of the human consciousness ...

In 2040, we encountered the Singularity.