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Ray Dalio joins the Bitcoin movement. That's how part of the financial press and the crypto ecosystem presented the news, anyway. The founder of Bridgewater, one of the most listened-to macro investors on the planet, but also one of the most consistent skeptics about Bitcoin, writes that he expects non-state-produced currencies like gold and Bitcoin to perform relatively well.
It must be said that the setting lends itself to it. At the same time, the US federal debt exceeded $40 trillion. The 30-year yield hit 5.33%, its highest level since 2007. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced he will double the size of some long-term debt purchases. And in the midst of all this, Bitcoin is having its best week since 2023.
So naturally, we think, "Great, another convert to the adventure." Especially since I love Ray Dalio. And not just anyone, we're talking about a man who has spent more than 50 years in sovereign debt markets, studying how states choose between default, restructuring and devaluation. Except, well, no.
Dalio has not changed his mind about Bitcoin. He continues to prefer gold. He continues to list its flaws. And yet, he holds about 1% of his portfolio in it, which, God knows, is very large. However, the reason why he still holds it is, in my opinion, one of the strongest arguments in favor of Bitcoin.
Not because Dalio is enthusiastic, but precisely because he is not . It all starts with a question-and-answer format. Ray Dalio is asked which areas of the world he considers problematic from a budgetary point of view. His answer is indeed most. The United Kingdom, the European Union, China and Japan are experiencing comparable debt and deficit problems.
Dalio therefore expects a comparable process of debt adjustment and currency devaluation. And it is from this point that he explains that currencies not produced by a state, such as gold and Bitcoin, well, behave relatively well in this type of context. Then, he recommends underweighting bonds, overweighting gold, and holding a small amount of Bitcoin.
And he has a numerical idea behind all of this. Put a small percentage, perhaps 10 to 15% of your money into gold. So, the 10 to 15% is for gold only. As for Bitcoin, it's a bit... And I emphasize this because I've seen headlines mentioning 15% in gold and Bitcoin. I would have been the first to applaud, believe me, but no, that's not Dalio's recommendation.
And besides, he doesn't say that there are only two coherent assets left on Earth, of which Bitcoin would be one. No, he continues to recommend diversification between asset classes and between countries whose accounts hold up. That's the observation, but what fascinates me here is that Dalio's reasoning is not reasoning about Bitcoin.
This is a reasoning based on balance sheets in which Bitcoin only appears at the very end. To understand this, Dalio proposes an exercise, and I suggest you do it with him. You run an organization that takes in about $5.5 trillion a year and spends about $7.5 trillion. That's almost 40% more than what comes in, we agree.
And you can't cut almost anything because the essentials are already committed or considered vital, or at least, you have popular pressure that makes it impossible. So, well, you borrow, like last year, like the year before, and so on. Except that with each round, the interest bill grows faster than your income and starts eating into the rest of your budget.
Then comes the moment when your creditors do the math. At the current rate, some prefer not to renew. New buyers must then be found for an ever-increasing amount of debt . From this point on, and without budgetary adjustments, there are only two outcomes. The first option is to let the rates rise until someone finally agrees to buy some.
It works, there's always a price that finds a buyer. But in the process, you stifle credit, you break markets and you trigger a chain reaction of bankruptcies. This is the deflationary path. And the second way to do it is for the central bank to create money and buy back enough debt to meet the shortfall in private demand.
It seems as if the debt crisis has magically disappeared. Hi Jean-Luc. But actually, no, she mostly just changed her look. And you end up with a currency that is worth less and less. Dalio spent nearly 50 years in sovereign debt markets and studied 65 major debt crises over a century, including 35 where the government or central bank could no longer honor its commitments without defaulting.
Restructuring or monetary creation until the following conclusion is reached . For states whose debt is denominated in a currency that their central bank can create, the first solution is so painful that central banks always end up taking the second option, printing money . ! And here, we are not dealing with prophecy, it is once again a game of incitement.
You rarely win an election by orchestrating a depression to protect the purchasing power of the currency. So far, OK, very good. A currency can devalue, we know how to do that. Finally, we have ways to get out of this. We sell the weak, we buy the strong, it's the diversification that everyone has learned, the famous Gresham's Law .
And indeed, Dalio does not say that changing currency is pointless. No one is at the same stage or at the same pace. But you are no longer fleeing the common cause; you are dividing yourselves among several manifestations of that same cause. So, we tighten the filter. We are no longer looking for the best asset at the moment.
We are looking for something much narrower, a monetary asset, liquid, transferable, scarce and not someone else's liability. Or at least, I do n't like this formula, which is precisely everyone's liability , because in monetary matters, it is only a matter of debts. And it is only at that moment, at the end of the subtraction, that the two examples that Dalio names appear, gold and Bitcoin, which are the debt of the entire Earth.
Bitcoin doesn't enter Dalio's house through the front door, it enters through the back door, and that's what makes his reasoning more solid than that of any convinced bitcoiner since he has a negative bias. An argument by elimination possesses a property that no argument by conviction possesses. It does not depend on the opinion of the person who states it.
It also does not ask us to love what remains, and to contest it, we must attack the filter or the arithmetic of the balance sheets by the tastes of the one who states it. And that's what I personally love about Dalio, he's someone with great rationality who supports his points of view and who is ready to eat his words when necessary.
Having said that, if debt leads to actions that states do not produce, why does it only grant Bitcoin one? Before answering that, I would like to take 30 seconds to clarify one point. I am often told that I am biased, that I only focus on pro-Bitcoin arguments and to hell with the rest. So yes, I'm biased, the channel is called Grand Angle Bitcoin for those who might not have noticed.
But I don't think that means I'm moving forward with blinders on. That's precisely why I keep saying that we need to see the world as it is, not as we would like it to be. But if there is one person who has a raw vision of the world, it is Ray Dalio. He is not a convinced bitcoiner, far from it, and contrary to many detractors, some of the arguments that limit his interest in Bitcoin, although I do not share them, make sense to me, they can be understood.
So the first thing he tells us is that Bitcoin tends to behave like a technology asset, which greatly weakens its appeal as a safe haven asset. OK. And on that point , depending on the periods observed, the figures may occasionally prove him right . In May, for example, the 90-day correlation between Bitcoin and the Nasdaq reached 89%.
But this is not a stable property. In its August 17 analysis, BlackRock describes its correlation peaks as one-off rather than structural and estimates that over longer horizons, Bitcoin remains weakly correlated with traditional risky assets . And if you want the live demonstration, a few days ago, the 90-day correlation between Bitcoin and the Nasdaq fell to 38%, its lowest level in a year.
And if you regularly listen to Grand Angle Bitcoin, you know that Yves Choueifaty on this channel has already said several times that Bitcoin is the least correlated asset to anything on the financial markets. And Yves is a bit like Ray Dalio. Apart from math, he doesn't have much belief or faith in anything.
He's rational, a quantity, pure sugar, and that's what I like. Moreover, it should be noted that while Bitcoin's correlation with the Nasdaq fell to 38%, at the same time, gold's correlation with the Nasdaq climbed to 52%, its highest level since October 2020, which is clearly a manifestation of a temporal exception and not an intrinsic property.
Next comes size. Dalio describes Bitcoin as a still small and relatively controllable market. And it's certain that compared to the $31 trillion that the World Gold Council valued at the above-ground gold stock at the end of 2025, well, Bitcoin doesn't carry much weight. However, I would like to point out that most of this gold is held in the form of jewelry and another part is allocated to technological and industrial uses.
If we only consider the gold that is actually investable, we fall to around 14 trillion and the ratio is no longer 20 to 1, but approximately 9 to 1. So yes, through his giant eyes, 9 to 1 remains enormous when you have to invest several billion. But hey, put a Bitcoin at 200,000 or 300,000 dollars and then we'll have a bit more fun.
He then raises the potential problems that quantum technology could pose. So, I'm not going to elaborate on this, we've already dedicated several videos to this topic. For now, these objections are quite classic, but understandable, let's say. However, once again, they describe a temporal exception and not an intrinsic property.
Because quantum computing works perfectly well with Bitcoin. Size and correlation are constraints on adoption. Quantum technology is a temporary, hypothetical risk, and not without a solution. However, where it gets much more interesting is when he tells us that Bitcoin has no privacy. All transactions can be monitored and therefore indirectly controlled.
I'll clarify just in case, when we talk about control here, it's not the protocol and its UTXOs, but rather the user behind it. And here, in this case, we are dealing with something different, because it is neither something temporary, nor an adoption phase. It's written in stone, in the protocol. Dalio's objection is simple.
A central bank holding Bitcoin would risk, once its addresses are identified, publishing the amount of its position and each of its transactions to its adversaries. So, for a central bank that is precisely seeking to preserve the timing and direction of its interventions, this is a serious problem. And in this case, his argument holds water.
But at the same time, if I want to do a bit of Macron, take advantage while he's still there, there's another way to test this objection. To compare it with the best-documented case of sovereign reserve immobilization in recent history. As of February 25, 2022, the Central Bank of Russia held approximately $630 billion in reserves.
And suddenly, nearly 300 billion become inaccessible in a matter of days. The U.S. Congressional Research Service explains that the main funds that were not frozen were reserves held in China and gold stored in the vaults of the Central Bank. In the European Union, approximately 210 billion euros have been frozen, including some 185 billion with a single Belgian depository, Euroclear, the famous Euroclear.
No public registry was required to identify and freeze these assets. What made the freeze possible was that an intermediary controlled them under a jurisdiction participating in the sanctions. And here, we need to break things down so we don't get confused . We need to differentiate between visibility, custody, jurisdiction, and coercive capacity.
Visibility indicates what can be targeted. Custody indicates who can move the asset. The jurisdiction specifies who can give the order. And finally, coercion determines whether this order can actually be executed. Being visible does not automatically make one seizable, but it facilitates targeting as soon as custody, jurisdiction, or the key holder offers points of control.
And here, we must concede to Dalio what is rightfully his. Self-preservation eliminates the need for a custodian. It does not eliminate the identification of funds, it does not eliminate the physical or legal constraint on the one who holds the keys, just as it does not eliminate sanctions at points of entry and exit.
A public balance remains identifiable in a way that is unmatched by a safe deposit box in Moscow or Zurich. His objection to central banks is therefore valid. But look now at what has become of that gold . Four years later, it has successfully escaped Western freezes and the central bank has intensified its domestic gold operations.
Yes, Russia can still sell on its domestic market or find counterparties outside the coalition that sanctions it. But what has been severely reduced is its access to the deepest markets and its convertibility into major reserve currencies. What I want you to understand through this example is that escaping seizure and retaining full usability are two distinct problems.
Russian gold did not publish transaction by transaction on a public register. Neither are its reserves denominated in euros and dollars. This did not prevent either freezing the second ones or severely limiting the use of the first one. Conversely, the fact that Bitcoin transactions are visible does not in itself give the power to seize funds or prevent their use.
Being seen and being controlled are two different things. Conversely, being opaque does not mean being free. What Dalio counts as a liability, everyone can see what you own, becomes an asset the moment you have to prove what you own without having to trust a third party. That is the meaning of the response that Michael Saylor gave him in May.
Transparency is what makes the asset usable as global collateral. And paradoxically, this transparency also promotes the financialization of Bitcoin, therefore its adoption and the deepening of its market. This will increase its size and ultimately reduce its correlation with risky assets, which are precisely two of the limitations that Dalio points out today .
So, if his allocation seems timid, it's, if you ask me, because Dalio doesn't just reason asset by asset, he reasons by function in a portfolio. And that is very important because it is the whole point of Markowitz's work. A portfolio is far more powerful than a haphazard collection of assets. As we have seen, the 10 to 15% relates to gold.
Bitcoin is kind of inside this pocket. But in the pocket meant to protect against currency devaluation, Bitcoin faces off against gold in a place that is already occupied. Dalio is not giving Bitcoin the throne , he is giving it a seat. But a seat gained by subtraction is much harder to regain than a seat gained by enthusiasm, because in his current reasoning, it is not so much Bitcoin that is rising in his ranking as the currencies and sovereign debts that are falling around it.
In other words, what could make him reduce this small amount of Bitcoin would be the sustained return of fiscal and monetary orthodoxy. Good luck. But imagine, the essence of what Dalio tells us this summer, well, he had already written almost word for word in June 2025. He not only kept the same opinion, he reused the same text.
What has changed is everything around it. In 14 months, the US federal debt has increased by nearly $4 trillion . The 30- year yield continued to climb, reaching a level not seen since 2007. The Treasury had to double its purchases of long-term maturities, and meanwhile, Japanese cash holdings had already fallen by 2.3% in June.
So, as time went on , it was not Dalio who joined the opinions of the world, it was the world that joined what he had already stated 14 months earlier. And that's exactly what I tried to show you earlier with subtraction. A conviction needs to be nurtured; it requires good news, confirmations, reasons to still believe.
A subtraction, well no, it doesn't need anything, it holds as long as nothing comes back on the list. Dalio nevertheless gives us the conditions that could cause his thesis to fail, the one that currently benefits gold and Bitcoin. The first is to bring the US deficit down to around 3% of GDP, compared to the 7% projected today, by combining spending cuts, revenue increases, and a natural easing of interest rates.
Again, let me tell you, we're not there yet . Next, debt servicing needs to stabilize relative to revenues instead of continuing to eat away at the rest of the budget. Finally, private demand must once again be able to absorb emissions without the central bank needing to buy back what nobody wants. In other words, we're still in the realm of science fiction.
However, if these three things happen to occur sustainably, then sovereign debt comes back on the list and the subtraction machine stops. One of the main reasons for overweighting non-state-issued currencies disappears. Well, it's clear that since the original text, this is definitely not the direction things have taken.
But if you want to know the reasons for the failure of his thesis, well, here they are. So, where does all this come from? But to be frank, not exactly where we would like it, I grant you that. But that's precisely what makes the reasoning interesting. Dalio does not demonstrate that Bitcoin will become the next global reserve currency, he explains something more modest, but perhaps more solid.
Why would an investor who doesn't particularly believe in Bitcoin, who prefers gold and who openly points out its flaws, still choose to hold it? Many of you came to Bitcoin to make money, out of conviction, philosophy, or a desire for freedom. Not him. What led him there was the progressive deterioration of the currencies and balance sheets of the major powers and above all a solid theory of portfolio construction.
And perhaps that is what forces us to change our perspective. Stop seeing Bitcoin as the golden goose capable of multiplying your capital in record time, but as long- term insurance against a risk that the system itself accumulates. So, what are the real risks with this? To be clear, Bitcoin can fail for its own reasons.
But if the macro thesis that supports it weakens because states and central banks become sustainably reasonable again, your insurance may be worth less, but the world you were protecting yourself against will not have materialized, which is really a good thing. Because if the finances of the world's major states explode, I assure you we'll feel it.
In other words, you may have lost the insurance, but you will have gained the luxury of living in a world where public finances are sound and currencies retain their value. And then, if the current trajectory continues until the crisis described by Dalio, well, you will hold an asset that is everyone's liability, mobile on a global scale and truly without having to trust a third party's account.
Bitcoin therefore does not need to replace the system to justify its place. All he needs to do is be there the day the system stops keeping its promises.
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