The Pomp Podcast - Why Isn't Bitcoin Going Up While Gold & Silver Are Surging? | Anthony Pompliano

Episode Date: January 26, 2026

In this solo episode, Anthony Pompliano explains why bitcoin is lagging while gold, silver, copper, and platinum are surging. He breaks down the forces driving the metals rally, how Wall Street adoption has reshaped bitcoin’s market structure, and why inflation expectations, global stability, and AI are influencing where capital flows today.========================Sign up for the Gemini Credit Card: https://gemini.com/pomp #GeminiCreditCard #CryptoRewards This video is sponsored by Gemini. All opinions expressed are my own and not influenced or endorsed by Gemini. Gemini-branded credit products are issued by WebBank. For more information regarding fees, interest, and other cost information, see Rates & Fees: https://gemini.com/legal/cardholder-agreement. Some exclusions apply to instant rewards; these are deposited when the transaction posts. 4% back is available on up to $300 in spend per month for a year (then 1% on all other Gas, EV charging, and transit purchases that month). Spend cycle will refresh on the 1st of each calendar month. See Rewards Program Terms for details: https://gemini.com/legal/credit-card-rewards-agreement. Checking if you’re eligible will not impact your credit score. If you’re eligible and choose to proceed, a hard credit inquiry will be conducted that can impact your credit score. Eligibility does not guarantee approval.======================0:00 – Bitcoin vs metals: what’s driving the divergence?5:02 – Wall Street adoption & bitcoin’s market structure shift8:46 – Bitcoin as a chaos & inflation hedge12:24 – AI, attention, & competition for capital13:33 – Final thoughts & long-term patience

This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales. Using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. what's up everyone this is anthony pompliano many of you know me as pomp you're listening to the pomp podcast which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them

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everyone. One of the things I've been thinking a lot about is why is Bitcoin not going up when all of the precious metals are going up? It seems like those two assets were very tied together. There was a lot of correlation between them. And the fact that Bitcoin is not going up has got me thinking a lot about what's going on with Bitcoin. What are the market forces? What are all of the macro factors that are playing into this? And so I spent the weekend taking a deep dive and trying to better understand this. I thought I'd come on and try to explain to you exactly what I learned and what my current thoughts are. First, let's go take a look at the actual metals themselves. We have gold, which is up 80% in the last year, silver's up 250%, copper's up 40%,

and platinum's up nearly 200% over the last 12 months. At the same exact time, Bitcoin is down 16% over the last year. So not only are the metals up, they're up significantly, every single one of them. But Bitcoin is down, it's down double digits, and that obviously has people not feeling great. And so we've got to understand what is driving all of the price appreciation in the metals before we can think about Bitcoin. In terms of gold, I think that gold is a safe haven asset. And we know that central banks are buying more and more gold hand over fist for their reserves. It makes sense because not only are people dropping dollars and U.S. treasuries, but actually what we're seeing is a defiatization of the global economy. It means

that people are saying, look, I'm not going to sell dollars and I'm going to go and buy yen or yuan or pesos or anything else. Instead, what they're saying is I'm going to sell dollars, I'm going to buy gold. And so naturally gold, it's not a completely finite asset, but it's a scarce asset. And so if you have a significant increase in demand for a scarce asset, then gold's going to go up. But the thing that's interesting is it's not just gold, silver, which I think a lot of people say, well, silver is kind of the little brother of gold, but silver's demand is not only coming from people who want some sort of store value. Obviously, yes, some people buy it because they think that it is a scarce asset as well and it will appreciate. But I actually think that the

bigger story for silver is the fact that it's an industrial metal. You need silver to do a lot of different things. If you start to look at what is going on with silver, well, you start to say how many different pieces of defense equipment or AI hardware, or maybe even things like self-driving cars. There is significant demand for silver because the world is building things again. We are starting to produce stuff both in the United States and internationally. We're saying that we want to re-industrialize the world. And if we're going to do that, we need to have the raw materials to be able to go ahead and conduct that work. And silver is a big winner there. Now, some of the demand for silver is coming from the store value and some of it is coming from

the actual utility case. But I think that is a huge driver. And then obviously, if we go and we look at copper and we look at platinum, copper is really interesting because there's a lot of stuff there. You have all of the electric vehicles. You've got all of the electrical infrastructure. You've got renewable energy. All of those things need copper. And so there is significant industrial demand for copper. I don't think people are buying copper because they think it's a store of value. I think it's all industrial demand. And then platinum, very similar thing. Now, the thing that's interesting about platinum and the reason why it's up 200% in the last year is that there is very, very low supply. And so you have a market structure that is in favor

of platinum holders. And then you've got that increasing demand. It's a lot about what used to be the driving story behind Bitcoin is that there was this finite supply, huge demand, and that led to a big price appreciation. And so when you're looking at gold, silver, copper, and platinum, these things are all being driven by different inputs. There is demand that is increasing. You have low supply in some cases. In other cases, you just have so much demand that is overwhelming the current supply and that is driving the price higher. Now, what I find most interesting about this is there has been this rotation. Will Clemente pointed this out. I thought he was really on track with, this idea that gold kind of ran first and then people started

to push into silver and now copper and platinum. And so you've had this kind of rotation through the metals. I like to call it the metals mania because this thing is not stopping and doesn't seem like it's going to stop anytime soon. We're not going to stop building EVs. We're not going to stop putting in electrical infrastructure. We're not going to stop with renewables. We are going to continue to build all this stuff. And so the industrial demand for silver, copper, and platinum is going to continue. And that will likely lead to higher and higher prices over time. Now, that brings us to Bitcoin. Remember, the metals are all up

and they're up substantially, 40% to 250% over the last year. Bitcoin is down 16% at the same time. And so I think that there's a couple of pieces here that are worth paying attention to. First, you have the adoption by Wall Street. And I think that, you know, Jordy Visser has pointed out this IPO moment of Bitcoin.

You have people who had been holding Bitcoin for 10 plus years. They started to sell their Bitcoin or to hand it off to the Wall Street folks. A big reason why they might have held Bitcoin is because it was outside the system. It was antithetical to everything that Wall Street stood for. It had this aspect of being something that resisted the man or resisted the system. And so now that it's being brought into the system, those people may be not as excited.

They may think that there's not as much upside to it. Obviously, Peter Thiel and many others have publicly said that they think that Bitcoin's future prospects may not be as asymmetric as the past. I don't think that's a crazy idea. but the question is, how much will it continue to appreciate? And really, I think that a lot of those OGs, they're the ones who are saying, hey, look, I'm not as excited about the future as I was maybe 10 years ago. And so that handoff to Wall Street, I think has been one big driver. The second thing about the Wall Street adoption is that there are all kinds of financial instruments

that people now have access to. It used to be really hard to short Bitcoin. Well, now you can do it very simply. And so the fact that you're able to do everything from option selling to shorting, etc. I think that is having a different impact on the price. Doesn't mean it's all net negative, right? You can obviously use options to amplify your exposure to Bitcoin as well. But I do think that it has a change in the market structure. It has a change in the way that people think about Bitcoin's price action. And you just start to temper all of the volatility. And we've seen that Bitcoin used to be an 80 vol asset. Now it's more like a 40 vol asset. And so by bringing in that volatility, volatility impact is both on the upside and downside. You shouldn't expect

Bitcoin to be as parabolic, but you also shouldn't expect it to have the massive 80, 90 percent drawdowns that we saw in the past either. So I think that's one component of what's affecting Bitcoin is there's been a significant change to the market structure and these adoption by Wall Street. Ladies and gentlemen, as you know, I scour the world trying to find ways to help you make money, make better decisions financially or try to figure out what to do in your portfolio. My latest find is something that is going to help you in a way that you probably didn't even know you needed help the gemini credit card is doing something that no one else in the market is doing money in america is changing and bitcoin it went from being dismissed and it's now being discussed

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And so when there was wars that were breaking out, we had, you know, Israel and Hamas, we had Russia, Ukraine, we had the constant threat from Iran and China. All of those things were driving instability. When you have instability, people wanted to go and buy an insurance policy against the instability. And Bitcoin was the chosen asset in that case. Now, what's interesting to me is the central banks, their chosen asset is gold. Central banks have a lot of money and they're helping to drive the price of gold. But it seems like there is not as much of a bid for Bitcoin coming as this kind of insurance hedge. And I don't think it's because Bitcoin now doesn't serve as the insurance hedge. I just think that there's a lot more people in the

world who see stability rather than instability. They are looking and they are saying, wait, The wars are either winding down or being ended. They see dictators like Maduro, et cetera, being taken out of power. They see the constant threat being checked by countries like Iran. And we know that China obviously is now being kind of distracted with an entire internal review of their military and leaks and spies and all this kind of issue. And so when you see this, I think there's people who just say, wait a second, if the United States is going to take a leadership role in the global stage, if they are going to try to govern in terms of being peace through strength, then maybe there's going to be more stability. More stability means I don't need the insurance policy as much. Again, I don't know how much of the inflows or capital flows are actually affected by

that, but I do think that that is part of the narrative. The second thing that I think is happening is Bitcoin really started to become an inflation hedge. Obviously, if you go back in 2020, when the government decided they were going to print trillions of dollars, not only were all the Bitcoiners yelling and screaming on the internet about inflation, but you also saw people like Paul Tudor Jones and Stanley Druckenmiller. They came out and they said, I believe inflation is coming. I'm buying Bitcoin and gold and other store value assets.

And I believe that Bitcoin is going to be the fastest horse. Well, now what's interesting to me is that whatever the government reports doesn't really matter because their data is horrible. 40% of CPI inputs are estimates. The government's got no clue what inflation is. I prefer true inflation. It's a real-time alternative metric. It takes over 14 million daily price points from 40 different independent providers, and

they go ahead and they calculate what they think inflation is. Right now, they are showing 1.2%, and that 1.2% is 150 basis points lower than it was just 90 days ago. And so there has been a cratering of inflation in the economy. A huge reason for that is I think that there's a big deflationary force coming from artificial intelligence. I also think things like deregulation, the tax cuts, and various other policies are having an impact. And then obviously tariffs are deflationary, and I've been saying this for a year now.

And so whenever you have deflationary forces like tariffs and like artificial intelligence, I think that that negative impact on inflation, which is really positive because that means that prices aren't going up as fast anymore, that all of a sudden means that if people don't believe inflation is going to be 4%, 5%, 6%, they may not need the inflation hedge as much. Now, again, if you go back, gold has been going up, but I think that the driver is because of central banks buying it, not necessarily because a bunch of people

think inflation is coming and they're buying gold. And so if that was Bitcoin's big hat to hang on was, hey, this is going to be the inflation hedge, and that's what drove Bitcoin from sub $10,000 to over $100,000 over the last four or five years, then the question becomes if we get a deflationary period or disinflationary period, people are less worried about inflation,

then that is obviously going to deter some of the capital that is coming into Bitcoin. I think that you're seeing that in the price performance. Now, the last thing that I think is happening here is I believe that artificial intelligence is the shiny new tool. And so if you go and you look at young people, how many young people are talking about Bitcoin

versus talking about Claude Code or talking about Claude Bot or talking about Claude Cowork or talking about ChatGPT or talking about perplexity or going and trying to use some of these tools at their job? I just believe that a huge piece of capital flows in financial markets is all about how do I make money? And right now, a lot of people are not

looking at Bitcoin. That's why sentiment is so bad. They're not saying, oh, I'm going to go make a ton of money very quickly with Bitcoin. Instead, they're looking at the shiny new tool in markets, which is artificial intelligence. And they're saying to themselves, if I buy Nvidia, if I buy Meta, if I buy any one of these companies, the stocks, they're going up so fast, that's where I'm going to be able to make money. If I can make money there, then I'm interested in actually allocating capital. On top of that, I think that they're thinking about their own personal time, energy, and mental bandwidth, and they're applying it to artificial intelligence as well. And they're saying to themselves, rather than go build a Bitcoin company, maybe I'll go build an

AI company and I'll be able to make money for myself, maybe even be able to build enterprise value that I eventually can sell as well. And so when you kind of zoom out here for a second, we obviously have the metals. The metals have done incredibly well. We've got gold, copper, silver, and platinum. They are all skyrocketing between 40 and 250% over the last year. Bitcoin is down 16% at the exact same time. And the reason why is I think that people are understanding, okay, there's a little bit more stability in the world. There's a little bit less inflation that likely is to come.

And on top of that, artificial intelligence is the shiny new tool. And then last but not least, I also think that there's a very real entire situation where people are basically looking at the market and they're saying to themselves, well, if I can't make money at it and get rich quick, then maybe I'm going to go put my money somewhere else. Don't forget, things like prediction markets have come into the world and you see lots of capital being diverted there. You see lots of sports betting,

capital being diverted there. There is simply more competition. It reminds me of this entire idea that this guy at Light Shed told me at one point that I thought was really interesting. He said to me, somebody who owns a podcast, they are competing with Netflix, who's competing with Spotify,

who's competing with YouTube. We're in an attention economy and it doesn't actually matter if you consider yourself in the same industry or not. When somebody opens their phone, And they simply say, what am I going to do? Well, everyone's competing with everyone. Do they watch the YouTube video?

Do they listen to the Spotify song? Do they listen to the podcast? Or do they do something else? All of those things are in competition for people's time. And time is finite. Time is scarce. And so as people were trying to figure out what to do with their time, the companies that were winning that attention war,

they're the ones who accrued value. I believe the exact same principle exists in financial markets. When somebody opens up an exchange or a financial app, and they say to themselves, I just got paid. I've got a little bit of money left over. Where do I put it? Every asset is competing with each other. And so today, now all of a sudden, if I want asymmetry, it's not just Bitcoin as the only game in town. There's Bitcoin, there's AI, and there's many, many other companies. But there's also things like prediction markets and sports gambling. When you add all of that up, it's all competing against each other.

And you may say, oh, there's no way somebody is trying to actually make a decision between buying Bitcoin, investing in NVIDIA, or going and gambling on sports. But I actually think that a lot of young people, that is how they think about it. They simply are trying to drive a return. And what you consider the difference between investing and gambling, they don't see it that way. They simply see it all as risk-taking. And so when you have high degrees of competition, when you have high degrees of risk-taking, it doesn't matter whether they're buying Bitcoin, an AI company, sports gambling, or prediction market. To them, they are wagering capital. they are calculating probabilities of getting a return, and then they are living and dying

with their decisions. In one way, it's more of a free market. It's much more meritocrate. But also, on the other hand, it's kind of weird. Do we really want our society addicted to gambling? Do we really want our society going and trying to bet in a prediction market on the color of someone's tie or how long a press conference is? Whether you like it or not, that's the world that we live in, though. And people are going to take their capital, and they're going to vote with those dollars. They're going to put it in the place where they think it'll be taken care of best. And whether they're thinking long-term or short-term, ultimately, they are trying to drive a return. And I think that is why Bitcoin continues to lag behind. Now, the good news is that assets

that tend to lag behind at some point usually catch up. I don't think that the Bitcoin narrative has changed over the long run. In fact, I think that Bitcoin may be even more interesting sitting at $87,000 than it was at $126,000. If you love Bitcoin at 125K, you should love it at 87. But that's not how humans usually think. They tend to look at assets and say, well, this one's going up, so let me go buy it. And then when assets are going down, they usually are like, well, I don't like that. It's not working. But as we know, maybe the great Charlie Munger quote, the big money is not made in the buying and the selling. It's made in the waiting. And I think that's what Bitcoiners are realizing, is that if you continue to dollar cost average into Bitcoin or any great asset,

you hold it for a long time and just let the asset do what it was intended to do. It usually will turn out just fine. And if you don't believe me, ask the gold bugs. They sat on gold for a decade, and people kept making fun of them, saying it's not working. I had plenty of fun, you know, just ribbing a little bit Peter Schiff and many other gold books. But congratulations to these guys. They had a thesis, they waited, and they were right. And today, gold now trades over $5,000 per ounce. And if you go back and you listen to their interviews a decade ago, that's what they were predicting.

They thought it was going to happen much faster, but eventually it did happen. And so I think that Bitcoiners are very similar. If you have patience, it'll be just fine. But if you actually get impatient, if you get short-term oriented, and you want to only hold Bitcoin, if it's going to go up 100% every single year, you're going to be disappointed. You're going to get shaken out. And just like the gold bugs are celebrating today, you won't be invited to the Bitcoin party when it finally starts to do the exact thing that it was created to do. That's it for today. I hope you guys enjoyed this.

Please leave a comment and let me know what else you think would be really interesting for me to tackle. I'll try to do these solo episodes every once in a while. It'll be short and quick, but it'll be trying to answer a question as to why something's happening in the market. I'll talk to you guys next time.