Just now, I realized an interesting fact about gold prices in 1982 that many people may not have noticed.

If you compare it based on real purchasing power, the gold price in 1982 was about 16% higher than today. That sounds contradictory, doesn’t it? Gold has risen to 5,600 USD/oz, so why is it lower than in 1982 when measured in terms of money?

The answer is very simple: money is being printed faster than gold is rising in price. That’s why 1 ounce of gold today can buy about 16% less than 1 ounce of gold in 1982.

Let’s make it more concrete. In 1982, 1 ounce of gold could buy a small house. At that time, there wasn’t much money in society, so gold was truly extremely expensive relative to currency. The gold price in 1982 had a very large absolute purchasing power.

Nowadays, 1 ounce of gold is about 5,200 USD. But a similar house now costs 500,000 USD or more. You see: even though the nominal gold price is much higher, it no longer lets you buy a house like it used to.

This is the direct result of money being printed faster than assets increase in value. People who own assets that are sensitive to new money get rich very quickly (in Vietnam, starting from the 1990s, that was real estate). People who only hold gold to preserve value stay put. And what about those who hold cash? They fall behind.

In an ever-evolving social environment, standing still is losing. As money keeps being printed, “high” numbers will become normal. A 20 billion won house is no longer shocking, a 5 billion won car is normal, and gold at 10,000 USD/oz won’t be surprising.

But the real danger is this: wages don’t keep up. The feeling that “everything is getting more expensive” is actually just money losing value, not assets naturally becoming more expensive.

Buying gold only helps you preserve the value of your assets, but it doesn’t help you get richer within the dollar system. In fact, you may fall behind relatively as money continues to swell.

If you want to get out of the “dollar slavery” mode, you need to find an asset with more momentum and more sustainable growth than gold. Such an asset not only preserves value, but also improves its position within an expanding monetary system. Compared with gold in 1982, Bitcoin has proven that it can outperform by a large margin.

Maybe that’s exactly why more and more people are shifting from gold to Bitcoin to protect their assets.