There is no global ledger for gold.

No registry.

No shared accounting.

No proof-of-reserves.

No immutable record.

Every ounce of gold on Earth exists in a fog of:

private vaults

offshore holdings

undeclared stashes

melted-down bars

repurposed jewelry

counterfeit bars

bars swapped or filled with tungsten

gold that “disappeared” into governments

gold allegedly seized, but who knows

gold that changed hands without documentation

Nobody knows the total.

Nobody can know the total.

Gold’s “ledger” is whispers and paperwork.

The mining supply is known. The above-ground supply isn’t.

We can estimate mining output:

annual production

historic mining figures

industrial recovery rates

But above-ground gold moves like a shadow asset:

melted

recast

concealed

seized

stolen

buried

privately hoarded

It has no chain of custody.

The system relies on “trust-me bro” accounting

Central banks allegedly hold:

8,000 tons

3,000 tons

600 tons

…but these numbers are whatever the bank claims.

No public audits.

No transparency.

No verifiable cryptographic proof.

No global consensus.

Even the U.S. gold reserves at Fort Knox haven’t undergone a full audit in over 60 years.

We believe in gold holdings the same way medieval kings believed the priest when he said:

“The relics are genuine.”

It’s ceremony, not truth.

Gold can be double-counted — or claimed by multiple entities.

Gold has no UTXO set.

No unique identifier.

No global state.

If I loan a bar to a bank,

and the bank loans it to someone else,

and they use it as collateral for another loan…

We now have three people who all think they own the same bar.

Gold is rehypothecated constantly.

Just like fiat.

Gold is the opposite of transparent

It’s:

opaque

unverifiable

geographically siloed

permissioned

susceptible to seizure

easily counterfeited

expensive to move

impossible to audit globally

political rather than mathematical

It’s the perfect asset for empires and cartels —

the worst asset for an open, global, digital civilization.

Bitcoin exposed this truth

Bitcoin didn’t “replace” gold.

It revealed gold’s flaw:

If you cannot measure it,

you cannot trust it.

Bitcoin sits in the opposite camp:

every coin accounted for

every movement logged

every supply known to the satoshi

no double-counting

no ambiguity

no fog

no secrecy

no elite vaults

no trust required

It is the only asset in human history with a perfect ledger.