Bitcoin, not gold, has the Midas touch

It’s an alternative to paper currencies. It can be traded anywhere in the world. It has a limited supply. And it should be a secure haven if financial markets start to crash. That is a fairly accurate description of gold. It is also an accurate description of bitcoin, the digital currency that is gaining in popularity all the time.

But here’s a puzzle. The price of gold has been falling for most of this year, and it would be a brave investor who called this as the bottom of the market. And yet the price of bitcoins has been soaring. The goldbugs will tell you that the price of gold is being suppressed — it would be a lot higher if it was not being manipulated downwards. Others will argue that bitcoin is a faddish bubble, a nerd-ish equivalent of 17th century Dutch tulips. Its soaring price tells us nothing — except that people are as easily fooled as they always have been.

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The actual answer is more interesting. Clearly there is a demand for alternative currencies, and bitcoin is in many ways a better product for that market. The price divergence is an illustration of how bitcoin is edging gold GCG4 -0.35%   out of the “alternative money” market — and that is hardly bullish for the precious yellow metal.

For the few people who have not yet heard of it, bitcoin is a purely digital currency, minted in limited quantities by a pre-determined algorithm. No one knows who invented it, and no one controls it. Right now, there are 11 million bitcoins in circulation, and the algorithm will eventually create around 21 million of them. And that will be the lot — production will stop, and there will be that amount of digital money available, and no more.

At the start of this year, you could pick up one of those bitcoins for $13. Looking back, that was the steal of the year. The virtual currency jumped to a record of $947 Tuesday on the trading exchange Mt. Gox.

The point about bitcoin is that it is designed to be all the things that gold was back when the precious metal was a currency. It has a limited supply. It is not controlled by governments or central banks. It is not anonymous, as some people occasionally claim, but it is a lot more private than money held in a bank account. It is a store of value.