Exchanging Bitcoin for Tether Gold
20250826
Bitcoin has fallen below $110,000. Zerohedge reports that a “Bitcoin whale” has been selling, putting the money into Ethereum.
What to make of it? First of all, ten percent corrections have happened often throughout the history of Bitcoin. This is nothing unusual. Secondly, the money going into Ethereum remains a vote of confidence in crypto itself, simply favoring another coin.
Ethereum offers something that Bitcoin does not. Other tokens can be tied to its blockchain. This link describes how they are handled by one hardware wallet. All sorts of other assets have been tokenized: dollars, Euros, gold, silver, Tesla stock and so on. These tokens offer small investors, people who may not have the means to open a brokerage account, a means of getting exposure to other assets.
I don’t see how this facility enhances the value of the Ethereum crypto coin, but perhaps one of you readers can explain it. Whatever the case, after lagging Bitcoin last year, Ethereum has been on a tear as Bitcoin has been falling. However, as I wrote last month there is still quite a bit to recommend Bitcoin. This link leads to a number of very informative, if unabashedly bullish articles.
Investigating the possibilities, I tried the Trezor swap facility this morning to trade a bit of Bitcoin for $500 worth of Trezor Gold, symbol XAUT. Whereas Bitcoin’s moves tend to be large and unpredictable, slower-moving gold is headed only one direction – up. As I have written before, this requires two levels of trust: first in Ethereum, and secondly in the outfit that holds the gold backing the tokens. It is wildly international, headquartered in El Salvador. I trust it enough to put a toe in the water for now, ready to watch it for a while.
There are three silver backed crypto tokens, none of which is mentioned in the link above. While I believe that these point to the future of investing, I’m not ready to jump that far into the unknown.
Being an octogenarian in Ukraine has its disadvantages. I’m sure there is an active community of people who invest in these things, but it will be Gen Z in the United States and Europe. The players will be hard to vet, and there is a lot of fraud and deceit in the crypto world.
Our investing philosophies are different. Gen Z will be swinging for the fences, looking for large returns on modest sums, ones they can afford to lose. Huge gains would not much change my life at this point. My objective is protecting what we have, with the objective of passing it on to my kids. If I put any more money into tokens such as XAUT, I will be doing it with Eddie. He does belong to Gen Z, and needs to learn this stuff.