Recently, while watching geopolitical tensions heat up, I came across something quite interesting. Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio is again promoting gold and, at the same time, heavily criticizing Bitcoin—but the market’s actual move slapped him in the face.

On Tuesday, Dalio fired in on a podcast, listing three major charges against Bitcoin: lack of central bank endorsement, no privacy at all, and the threat posed by quantum computing. He reiterated that gold is the true king of safe havens, claiming, “There is only one gold in this world,” and that “gold is the most mature currency.” The logic sounds pretty solid, but the reality is that the market simply doesn’t buy it.

On the very day Dalio made these remarks, the gold price tumbled by $168 to $5,128 per ounce, with a single-day drop as high as 3%. By contrast, Bitcoin only saw a slight correction of 0.7%, firmly holding the $68,700 level. The contrast is really, painfully ironic.

At the time, the US-Iran war had already reached its fifth day, and the market was shrouded in intense geopolitical anxiety. This should have been a big moment for gold to shine, yet the “safe-haven tool for troubled times” that Dalio had kept pushing ended up falling even worse than cryptocurrencies. Watching this trend, I couldn’t help thinking—does this mean he’s basically getting slapped in the face for all the traditional safe-haven theories?

In fact, the decoupling between Bitcoin and gold is not the first time. From last July to the start of October, their price movements were still fairly synchronized, until a $20 billion liquidation wave erupted in the crypto market and they went their separate ways. From the October peak, Bitcoin pulled back by more than 45%, while gold surged by 30% over the same period, directly breaking through the $5,100 mark.

Now looking at the specific price action during this geopolitical conflict: when the military strikes erupted on Saturday, gold did indeed spike for a wave. But as the fighting spread and markets worried about potential oil supply disruptions, gold started to lose support and gave back all of its gains. For Bitcoin, even though it also faced sell-offs on Saturday, after news of the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader broke on Sunday, it launched a strong rebound.

This series of fluctuations shows a reality: no asset can perfectly play the role of a safe haven. Both have gone through fierce swings—it's just that Bitcoin’s volatility has been relatively smaller.

To be frank, Dalio’s doubts about cryptocurrencies are basically the same old story. He keeps focusing on Bitcoin’s transparency issue, saying that every transaction can be monitored—so how could central banks possibly hoard an asset that runs on a public ledger? He also points to quantum computing as a long-term existential threat hanging over Bitcoin’s head.

What’s interesting, though, is that Dalio is not entirely bearish on Bitcoin. In his personal investment portfolio, he still keeps about 1% allocated to Bitcoin. Even last July, he advised investors to allocate 15% of their funds to Bitcoin or gold, calling it the best risk-reward choice.

Just last month, Dalio warned that cracks are appearing in the US-led “world order,” and that investors should rethink their wealth preservation strategy. But now the question has become: at a time when global instability is worsening, is gold really still the only solution? This is precisely the topic being fiercely debated on Wall Street and across global markets. And this week’s unexpected series of price moves has clearly made Dalio’s “gold supremacy” argument increasingly hard to convince the public.