People Will “Flock en Masse” to Bitcoin as Coronavirus Affects Gold Supply: Max Keiser

Thursday packed a punch after jobless claims soared to 6.6 million after previous week’s over 3 million Americans filed for unemployment. A total of nearly 10 million jobs have vanished in just two weeks as the coronavirus pandemic shuttering business forces vast layoffs.

The speed and scale of such losses are unprecedented, “What usually takes months or quarters to happen in a recession is happening in a matter of weeks,” said Michelle Meyer, chief U.S. economist for Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

US stocks edged higher on soaring jobless claims along with oil prices with Brent Crude up 6% after President Trump said he believes Russia and Saudi Arabia can de-escalate their oil price war.

Gold also jumped after opening lower on a firm dollar on Thursday. Spot gold was up 0.9% to $1,605.60 per ounce. Saxo Bank analyst, Ole Hansen said,

“Both bulls and bears can build a narrative in gold right now, with low inflation, weak physical demand from key buyers and the dollar’s strength for the bears and the economic shock, negative real yields and cenbank easing for bulls.”

Gold-god’s money or Bitcoin-people’s money?

According to ‘Rich Dad Poor Dad’ author Robert Kiyosaki, gold and bitcoin is the option to go for when the Fed is printing money.

Lesson 5. SAVE MONEY: RU NUTS? Why save money when QE FED counterfeiting is printing trillions of fake dollars-$82 billion a month to $125 billion a day? Why save when ZIRP, zero interest policy pays losers zero? Save gold-god’s money or Bitcoin-people’s money.

— therealkiyosaki (@theRealKiyosaki) April 1, 2020

However, Bitcoin proponent Max Keiser believes, people will “flock en masse” to bitcoin because there would be no gold for sale due to coronavirus. He said,

“I predict — and this is not only the ultimate use case but the ultimate irony — that once people realize that they cannot get gold, they’ll start flocking en masse into Bitcoin.”

As we reported, due to an increase in demand gold has been facing “unprecedented turmoil” as coronavirus shuts down supply sources.

In Q1 of 2020, while bitcoin was down 11.49%, gold ended the first three months with a positive 4% returns. Bitcoin is currently up 10% jumping to $6,850.

Source: Skew

The world’s leading cryptocurrency has also halvening coming in just over a month which Bitcoin proponents have taken to call “‘quantitative-hardening’ program,” unlike central banks’ unpredictable inflation and money creation. Adam Back, founder and CEO of Blockstream explained,

“Bitcoin quantitative hardening is the sound of bitcoin getting even harder. All while the world loses its fiat mind and plummets into quantitative easing infinity.”

This whole thing is worse than the https://t.co/GoodB34BOa bubble & 2008 crisis combined and really starts to take shapes of the Great Depression 2.0.

Long on $BTC, gold, silver & platinum for the coming years is at least my gameplan.

— Crypto Michaël (@CryptoMichNL) April 2, 2020

Bitcoin used as an intermediary currency

In other news, unlike gold, Bitcoin is “primarily being used as a vehicle currency across Latin America,” stated Matt Ahlborg, a data scientist at dlab.vc.

Huge if true. Shows that Bitcoin is already being widely used as a payment rail for Latin American workers to send money home to family, circumventing the government's restrictive out-of-country money transfer policies. https://t.co/eBTj35VEL6

— Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) April 2, 2020

As per his research, bitcoin is used as an intermediary currency between fiat currencies to transfer value in and out of Venezuela. The country with hyperinflation doesn’t allow for its currency to be freely exchanged with other currencies, as such,

“remitters and anyone else wishing to transfer value into or out of Venezuela are best served by using the vast network of informal money transmitters available to them.”

In 2019, LocalBitcoins facilitated the trade of $315 million dollar worth of bolivars but it was “a very small fraction of the total of Venezuela-related money transfers that ride Bitcoin rails.”

Bitcoin could actually be facilitating billions of dollars worth of censorship-resistant value transfer to and from Venezuela over the last few years and playing a part in “changing the destiny of an entire country,” said Ahlborg.