Saifedean Ammous, author of the 2018 academic book The Bitcoin Standard, has argued that Bitcoin already operates as a medium of exchange and that volatility is likely to become a diminishing obstacle to that role.

In a Tuesday post on X, Ammous wrote that Bitcoin (BTC) can function as a medium of exchange as it becomes less volatile than gold while surpassing the market capitalization of the largest precious metal.

“Holding Bitcoin is using Bitcoin as money, and its lack of widespread use as a method of payment is no evidence against its monetization unfolding,” he added.

Ammous's remarks respond to a passage in “Better Money: Gold, Fiat, or Bitcoin?”, a book by Professor Lawrence H. White, which contends that Bitcoin's fixed supply makes it too volatile to serve as a medium of exchange. In monetary economics, a medium of exchange is an asset broadly accepted in payment, while monetization describes the wider process of an asset being taken up as money, including as a store of value.

“With no supply response to demand swings, BTC's price is too volatile for people who want a reliable medium of exchange,” White wrote in a Monday X post, citing chapter six of the book. He added that the absence of a supply response is why stablecoins have “eaten BTC's lunch transaction volume.” The exchange turns on a recurring question for fixed-supply assets: whether price stability can emerge as adoption widens, or whether payment activity will keep shifting toward instruments whose supply can adjust to demand.

Ammous is not the only industry figure expecting Bitcoin to eventually surpass gold. Gold has long been treated as the benchmark for scarce, non-sovereign money, a status that underpins recurring market-cap comparisons with Bitcoin. In May 2025, Bitwise's head of European research, André Dragosch, told Cointelegraph that the firm's in-house forecast projects a $1 million Bitcoin price by 2029, which would make Bitcoin match gold's market capitalization.

For that to occur, Bitcoin's current $1.6 trillion market capitalization would need to grow by at least 18-fold to overtake gold's near $29 trillion market cap and become the leading global asset.

In April 2025, Blockstream CEO Adam Back predicted that Bitcoin would begin to rival gold's use cases as a monetary hedge, citing global financial instability and rising fiat inflation.

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