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 specialist at Golds silver.com alaniz will start there with the questions that Mike have for you where does gold go and what are its key risks in 2025 yeah thanks for having me so I'm definitely expecting gold to have a great year in 2025 just like it did in 2024 I would not be surprised at all if it clears that $3,000 an ounce threshold and it could be the last year to buy gold under $3,000 an ounce so in terms of the risk what would prevent it from doing that there's really two things

that I see one is actually Bitcoin if capital is attracted to bitcoin instead of gold gold might not creep that high and the other risk factor which really isn't a risk factor it's actually peace it's World Peace if all the wars and conflicts in the world settle down and our leaders are actually able to negotiate peace Capital might not flow into gold like it has been throughout the last couple years so those are the two risks that I see it's really gold is Bitcoin and peace all right so then for

the runup that we've seen in 2024 um Alan is it because of the geopolitical concerns mostly which we know gold has typically historically been a safe haven but is that the reason why we've seen such the runup in your view I think that's sort of the main underlying Factor because it's that geopolitical uncertainty that causes so many other things so we saw China buying a ton of gold not only is China the number one producer of gold in the world it's also the number one importer of gold in the

world and that's very unusual and investors around the world are also uh buying gold because of inflation and the inflation is caused by all these countries who are fighting Wars running their printing presses so if it weren't for the wars they wouldn't be running the printing presses so heavily investors wouldn't be worried about inflation and they wouldn't be running to Gold so I think it really starts with all the geopolitical uncertainty if we could all get along we wouldn't have to

buy gold we could just live our lives well Alan you heard Mike mclone there we were speaking a little bit about crypto and he maintains that this idea of a strategic Reserve is a fan bargain with the crypto people and the incoming president and the administration is that true in in your you well I think Bitcoin is best thought of as Superior money and anytime that two different monies come up against each other the same thing happens every single time throughout history Capital flows from the weak money into the

strong money and it's only a matter of time so if you look at the United States and you want to discuss the Strategic National Bitcoin Reserve is it a good idea is it a bad idea is it going to happen within the first 100 days or is it not even going to happen in the next four years all of that doesn't really matter capital is definitely going to flow from weak money like the US dollar into strong money like Bitcoin it's just a matter of time I think you need to back that up a little bit why do you say

Bitcoin is superior money it's not even money no offense I have yet to transact in Bitcoin and I think if you ask most people uh unless you go to an emerging area um have yet to transact in Bitcoin yeah it's a great question I'm glad you asked and I could talk about it for hours but I'll try to keep my answer short there's really two ways to think about money first is as a medium of exchange which I would actually call a currency so if you're going to buy a cup of coffee or groceries you're going to

use currency and you want something that moves quickly it has low transaction fees and doesn't take a lot of energy to make that transaction and the US dollar is great for that the other reason you'd have money is as a store of value and that basically means you acquire it and then you hold it for 10 years or 20 years and it just sits there and you might even forget that you have it but the whole point is for it to stay in one place and secure your value over time that's gold and it's Bitcoin so that

when I say money I'm referring to gold or Bitcoin that store of value uh functionality whereas a currency like the US dollar U that's more of a medium of exchange so by the way don't hold your breath on being able to use Bitcoin to buy a cup of coffee it's not going to happen it shouldn't happen it doesn't matter why are you so convinced it's a store of value because the supply is finite does that make it a store of value necessarily it's partly because the supply is finite but more

importantly it gets increasingly more difficult to make another Bitcoin that's so so so critical that happens naturally with gold no one has to design it that way but if there's two different ounces of gold sitting in the ground and one's really easy to get to and one's really hard to get to you're going to mine up the easy one so later in the future you're going to have to go after that hard one and spend more energy to get a unit of gold in the future Bitcoin mimics that same property artificially

using Code so that it takes more and more and more energy to mine each subsequent Bitcoin that's good news for anyone holding Bitcoin because if you acquired it earlier it didn't take you that much energy to get it however anyone who wants to acquire a Bitcoin in the future has to give up a lot of energy to get one I guess Alan I would ask that if there's a limited Supply I understand the Dynamics of supply and demand but if there's a limited Supply how can it be something that is used

much more broadly I understand the value of maybe blockchain in terms of transacting but the individual Bitcoin as a a way of transacting if it's going to be limited in Supply forever how can it be something that's much more broadly in use in terms of how we look at the US dollar or other currencies yeah well it it sort of relates to my previous answer which is that I wouldn't expect Bitcoin to be used in day-to-day transactions even if you develop something like the night lightning Network or other layer 2

Solutions they're called I don't think it'll be that common to actually transact Bitcoin uh it will be more common to transact US Dollars Euros Yen and so forth whatever jurisdiction you're Al didn't people say that about nfts too and and they're not worth very much these days are they I would not go anywhere near nfts no I only go near Bitcoin I made a mistake going after a dozen other cryptos when I thought they had uh attractive use cases but they're very hard to value and they have real

idiosyncratic risk so I even went so far as to go visit one of these cryptocurrencies in person I looked at their code I met the team I did my due diligence and I lost 99.9% of my value on that coin and I have multiple stories like that these most of these cryptocurrencies they're not well some are designed to be scams they're not all designed to be scams but some of them turn out to be scams because they have so many idiosyncratic risks you have to have execution on the part of the software team you have to have marketing

you have to have adoption you have to have functionality you can't have problem and you can't really have competitors that accomplish the same thing better than the way you accomplished it or you're not going to attract Capital so Bitcoin is still in the process of price Discovery how do you discover you know a a price when it's it's very unclear what the fundamentals are yeah I mean right its value is in that it's outside the establishment and yet that lack of transparency raises so many

questions well Bitcoin is transparent I mean it's a public blockchain right so you can go and look online and see where all the blockchains are sitting what the history of them has been in what block they were minded you can see all of that so transparency is actually pretty fantastic on bitcoin however if I want to see how many dollars exist I have to trust the federal reserve's data and I don't um and it could be you know outdated and I don't know who's holding those dollars or where they are the

faith of the US government and I know some could debate that right now but nonetheless you have the faith of the US government listen this excitement we know we could go on for probably another hour means this is going to be a Hot Topic in 2025 Alan thank you so much have a great New Year Alan Hibbard precious medals and alternative money spe specialist over at goldsilver.com hey folks we're head