According to CoinDesk, Cathie Wood, the CEO of investment manager ARK Invest, stated that a substitution from gold into bitcoin (BTC) is currently taking place, and the availability of spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs) will further extend this trend. Wood made these remarks on ARK Invest's 'Big Ideas 2024' podcast, highlighting that bitcoin's price has been consistently rising relative to gold since its inception.
Wood believes that the substitution into bitcoin will continue as it becomes easier to access the cryptocurrency. Bitcoin is often compared to gold as a store of value due to its finite supply and the difficulty in mining both gold and BTC. This is in contrast to other assets, such as national currencies, which can be printed without limits. The potential impact of the first spot bitcoin ETFs is compared to the effect of the first gold ETF, which led to a 250% increase in gold's price in the seven years following its launch in November 2004.