Transcription
There's a war happening right now. The US, Israel, Iran, an active conflict. And while everyone's watching the geopolitics and the oil price and the missiles and the regime change and all that, something's playing out inside this war that almost nobody in financial media is even connecting. And I'm talking about gold is down since the war started and Bitcoin went up. Now, most people have that completely backwards, right, from what they would expect. So, in this video, I'm going to show you exactly why that's happening. I'm going to show you why it's not a coincidence and I want to show you what it means for every asset that you own. So, let's go.
All right. Now, to set up the data and the charts that I'm going to show you, cuz I'm going to dig deep into this data, but let's just start with a true story. Now, a couple years ago, I was doing a podcast with a crypto analyst that you've probably heard of. His name is uh Ran Nuner. Now, again, if you're into crypto, you know who Ran is, right? He's been a really big voice in this space for a long time. And we're doing this podcast together, and he told me a story about his family. And uh it's a story that I've never forgotten. I've told it many times now.
He was telling me how his family was from Iran and how they they had to flee in 1979 when the revolution was happening and everything was falling apart really fast. And he told me how his father basically looked around and had to make a quick decision and probably the same decision that a lot of people back then made, maybe people are making today as well. And that was to convert everything that they owned, every asset, um, all the savings and basically all the gold and then melt it all down, right? So they could take it with them, right? And I guess that's what you do, right? You're going to sell everything and you're going to put it into gold because gold's real money. Gold holds value. Gold's accepted anywhere in the world, right?
So the family packs up and they get all the way to the airport and they're there at the airport getting loaded onto the plane to evacuate out and his father had melted all all the gold down and he had it like in a barrel or or some sort of bucket and the guard stopped him and they said like, "Hey, you you can't take that with you." And he's like, "But it's all my money. I got to take it." And they said they said, "You can't. So you're either going to stay here with your gold or you're going to get on a plane. One or the other." And so the family got on the plane and they left and they had to leave the gold. And that changed everything, right? They they left, but his father had to leave everything they had worked for, leave it right there on the tarmac in Tyrron.
Now, the family ended up being evacuated out. They ended up going to South Africa. And when they got there, they had to live in a tent cuz they they had no money. And I think about that story all the time. And I think about it right now because right now it's 2026 and Iranians are at the airport again. Same country, same chaos, same moment of truth. And the ones who figured something out, they're walking straight through the checkpoint with everything they own. That's what this video is about.
Okay, so let's bring this to the current day, to the present, what's going on, because the story isn't about history. This is a story about what's happening right now today. As of about a week ago, at the time of this recording, right, US and Israeli forces launched air strikes against Iran, right? The Supreme Leader was killed. The regime's in chaos. Uh the country is in full crisis mode right now, right? Protests in the street, internet blackouts, capital controls, and look, there's a whole lot to talk about on the politics, but that's not what we're gonna talk about today, right? But we're going to talk about the money.
And the Iranian currency, the real it's in a complete freef fall, right? And it's it's really bad. In 2018, one US dollar cost you about 40,000 realals. Today, it's 1.4 million. I didn't I didn't say that wrong. From 40,000 to 1.4 4 million. That's a 90% collapse in purchasing power in 8 years. Inflation's been running at 40 to 50% every single year. And then, you know, in that ATMs run dry, uh banks don't let you access the money, right? The internet goes dark when the government decides to shut it down or whatever. And on top of all that, now today with the war, you got air strikes. So people there, ordinary people are doing exactly what Ran's father did back in 1979. They're trying to get their money out, right? It's the same instinct, right? Run for safety, right? But some of them, right, the ones who were paying attention, they have something Iran's father didn't have back then, right? And that's the difference in everything. And it's not gold.
Now, before we talk about, you know, what the Iranians had, uh, I want to show you what happened to gold first because this is the part that I think actually surprised even me. I talked about this on social media when it was happening. But when a war breaks out anywhere in the world or in the Middle East, what's supposed to happen to gold is that it's supposed to go up, right? That's the whole safe haven narrative. War breaks out, people flee to gold. Gold price goes up. But what everyone expected didn't happen, right? That's what gets repeated on every single financial news channel every single time that there's a conflict. Except that's not what happened. Gold and silver dropped right when the war started.
Now, the reason why tells you kind of everything that you need to understand. So, let me show you something. Dubai, it's one of the biggest gold hubs in the world. In 2024 alone, the UAE imported 1,392 tons of gold. That's worth more than a hundred billion. That's just one country. In one single year, a hundred billion in gold that's sitting in vaults, right? It's on trading desks around the city. Now, Dubai handles more than 20% of all global gold flows, right? This is the center of physical gold for this entire region. 20%. And right now, in March of 2026, that gold, it's stuck. It's stranded. The same air strikes that threw Iran into chaos also closed the airspace. It closed the region. Flights got grounded, cargo routes got shut down, and shipments got halted.
Now, you know what happens to gold when you need to move it, but you can't? Well, you got to sell it and you got to sell it cheap. So, right now, today, dealers in Dubai, they're offering gold up to $30 per ounce below the spot price, below what the London benchmark price is. Think about what that means for a second. The world's biggest boyon hub, it's discounting their own gold. Not because gold isn't valuable, not because demand disappeared, because they can't physically get it to a buyer, right? And storage costs more money every single day. So then you do what you have to do and you drop the price. You find anyone who will take it off your hands and then you just take the loss.
But here's the thing about a million dollar gold bar that nobody talks about cuz most people have never seen a million dollar gold bar. But when you're talking about buying gold, you have to realize that that bar weighs 27 pounds. To move it, you need a plane, right? You need insurance. You need a trusted counterparty on the other end ready to receive it. You need airspace, of course, to fly that plane, right? You need a cargo route. that's that's still up and functioning. You need geopolitical situation stable enough that your shipment actually gets there. Now, when any one of those things breaks, like in a war, they all break at once, the bar is worth less than the market price says it is. It's worth a lot less, right?
And this isn't the first time this has happened. This is the pattern. In February of 2025, Trump tariff fears hit. We saw at that time gold at the Bank of England started trading at a $5 per ounce discount. We saw withdrawal cues get backed up, stretched out to 4 to 8 weeks. Traders were desperately trying to ship metal to New York, but but they couldn't get it there. We saw in March of 2020, COVID hit, right? Refiners shut down, planes got stuck, right? Supply chains broke down. Physical gold sitting in vaults were basically begging for somebody, right? Nobody could move it. In 2008, the great financial crisis, we saw gold drop 29% from $1,000 an ounce down to 712. bars were being sold at discounts because liquidity seized up and nobody could execute physical delivery.
So, it's the same pattern every single time. The moment the infrastructure breaks and infrastructure always breaks in a crisis, physical gold gets stranded. And stranded assets, they sell at a discount, right? It's not a flaw in the gold market. That's a permanent structural vulnerability of any asset that requires a physical supply chain to move. You see, gold needs a plane. Gold needs to be guarded, right? Gold needs a functioning system and right now in Dubai the system it's not functioning. So the gold sits and the price gets cut and the dealers you know they got to take a loss just to get rid of it.
But meanwhile just not too far away over in Iran something completely different is happening. But it's happening with a completely different asset right remember back to the intro back to my the story of Rand right and his father. They're at the airport. They're at the checkpoint and the guard stopped them and they and they had to leave their goal behind. And of course, his family lost everything. Now, I want you to picture a different version of that same story. Same airport, same checkpoint, same guards, except this time his father's walking up through and he has no gold bars. He has no cash. He has no jewelry. He has nothing physical on them at all. What he does have is he has 12 words memorized. That's it. 12 words in his head. And those 12 words represent his entire net worth. And then they walk to the checkpoint. They get on the plane. They land on the other side. And then they open up a phone. They type in those 12 words. And then all the money is there. Every single bit of it untouched, unseased, exactly as they left it. And and this isn't some hypothetical story. This is what's happening in Iran right now today.
We can see it in the data. Onchain data firms like Chain Analysis, they track crypto flows in real time. And what they're seeing coming out of Iran since these strikes began is extraordinary. Within minutes of the first US Israel strikes hitting in late February, I'm talking minutes, crypto outflows from Iran's largest exchange surged over 700%. $2 million an hour flowing out. I'm talking about moving into personal wallets, moving off of exchanges and into self-custody. Then over the following days, we saw Bitcoin withdrawals to self-custodial wallets surge 262%. We saw more than 10 million flee exchanges in just a couple of days. Now, the spikes were happening before the internet blackouts even hit, not after. Before that's the key piece, right? Which means people weren't reacting. They were preparing for this. They saw what was coming, right? They they started moving their money into something the government couldn't freeze before the government had a chance to freeze it. Not because they were speculating. They weren't speculating on the price. They weren't trying to make a quick trade. No, this was financial survival infrastructure operating in real time.
And this didn't start with the strikes. This has actually been building for years. Iran's crypto economy hit $7.78 billion last year in 2025 alone. Total crypto outflows from Iran in the prior year were up 70% year-over-year. Now, of course, partly because they might have known this day would come, but also partly because the math on the real it's, I don't know, unservivable. They were seeing 40 to 50% inflation every single year, which basically means that your savings are losing half of their value every single year. Now, if you try to move your money out through the banking system, well, the government can see it, right? They can freeze it. they can confiscate it. But of course, Bitcoin solves all three of those problems at the same time because it has one a fixed supply, right? 21 million hard-coded. Nobody can can inflate it. Nobody can print more of it. Nobody can devalue what you're holding, right? Number two, you can also take self-custody, right? What's in your wallet with your keys, no bank can freeze it. No government can block it. They can't stop the transaction. No internet blackout can stop you from moving it because Bitcoin transactions route around outages. Now, in this case, and in like Ran's family case, it's portable, right? With just 12 words, they could move their entire bank, right? They could cross any border on Earth.
Now, I know what you're already saying. I can hear it in the comments already. But Mark, Bitcoin's too volatile, right? Okay, I get that. But check it out. when you're faced with a guaranteed 40 to 50% devaluation every year and you're potentially getting stuck having to flee and not being able to take any of your money with you. Well, in that environment, Bitcoin isn't speculation, right? It's it's the conservative choice. The premium that I'm talking about, it tells you everything, right? When demand gets high, when it gets high enough, when enough people need to move money fast and Bitcoin is the only exit available, well, local prices rise. We see that local prices rose above the global benchmarks, right? Because people pay more. They're willing to pay more than spot price just to get access to something portable. We saw gold in Dubai selling below benchmark because nobody could move it. Bitcoin and Tyron is selling above benchmark because everybody needs it. So, it's the same or it's the same week, but two completely opposite outcomes. Now, Ran's father had gold bars and today's Iranians, they have seed phrases. the same crisis, the same airport. But they have a completely different story at this point.
You might be thinking, Mark, this is a war zone, right? This is an extreme situation. Iran is a sanctioned country. They have a collapsing currency and authoritarian government. This doesn't apply to me, right? You're right. Hope hopefully not. Hopefully, I'm right, right? And I get that reaction. But this is an Iran story, right? Iran is just the latest example of a pattern that's repeated in every single major economic crisis for the last decade. Right? We have different countries, we have different currencies, we have different governments, but it's the same outcome every single time. Let me take you through a couple examples.
Let's look at Venezuela 2018, right? Inflation hit 1 million%. I didn't say that wrong. 1 million%. Prices were doubling every 18 days. People were using Boulevard notes as wallpaper. They were using as as origami because the paper was literally worth more than the currency that was printed on it. The banking system was effectively nonfunctional. Capital controls made it illegal to move money out of the country. And Bitcoin trading volumes in Venezuela, they hit all-time highs. We saw in local bitcoins, we saw premiums on exchanges hit 80% above global spot price. 80%. People were willing to pay 80% more than the market price just to then get their money into something that they could actually move around. Eight million people eventually fled Venezuela, many of them with Bitcoin on a flash drive, some with nothing but a memorized phrase in their head.
We saw it in uh Ukraine back in February of 2022, right? Russia invaded. We saw crypto volumes in Ukraine surge 200% overnight. We saw refugees that crossed into Poland. Journalists documented that that all this was happening in real time. They are carrying hardware wallets. They are carrying seed phrases stitched into their jacket linings. There was a story of one man that carried his family's entire savings on a USB drive, his whole net worth. They walked right through the border checkpoint, right? The the guards had no idea. The United Nations Refugee Agency actually started delivering humanitarian aid through blockchain wallets because the banking system wasn't functioning reliably enough.
We saw it in uh Argentina in 2023. They had 140% inflation, then 276% inflation, and crypto adoption hit 30% of the population. Then it hit 51% of the population. Bitcoin trading at local premiums as the peso was collapsing. And it all happened in real time. People were using it to move savings across the border when their own government was trying to close it off. We saw it in uh Lebanon in 2022. They had 250% inflation. Banks literally froze customer accounts. People couldn't access their own money. Cash machines were empty. The banking system locked up. But Bitcoin didn't. Bitcoin volumes jumped 1,200%.
Lebanon, Argentina, Ukraine, Venezuela, Iran, all different countries, all different governments, different currencies, different crisises, but the same pattern in every single one. When a currency collapses, people flee to portable assets. When banks freeze, people flee to self-custody. When borders close, people flee to assets that don't need to cross a border. And every single time that happens, Bitcoin commands a premium because demand spikes and the supply is fixed. And every single time that happens, physical assets that get stranded, like gold sitting in a vault in, I don't know, Beirut, cash frozen in a Caracus bank account, jewelry confiscated at a checkpoint, right? That's not a coincidence. This is a law. Portable beats heavy, digital beats physical, censorship resistant beats permission dependent every single time.
And you don't have to be in Iran for this to matter to you. You don't have to be fleeing a war torn country. You don't have to be fleeing a war zone. You don't have to be living under an authoritarian government. You don't have to be dealing with hyperinflation. You just have to understand that you and wherever you live, like maybe in the US, while you're isolated from this, hopefully, you have to understand the US only makes up about 4% of the world's population. And while you might not be dealing with this, hopefully you're not, billions of people around the world are. So if we can think about the world for a second, if we can if we can stop thinking about our small little bubble, we can think about the world for a second, we can zoom out, then you can see that everything I've shown you so far, Iran, Dubai, Venezuela, Ukraine, it all comes back to one thing. Supply and demand. That's it, right? That's the whole equation. It's it's uh it's price 101. When demand goes up and supply is fixed, price goes up. When demand collapses and supply is stuck, prices go down. So that's why gold in Dubai, it's stuck, right? Stuck in a vault. Demand evaporated because nobody can receive the delivery. So the price goes down. But Bitcoin over in Thrron, supply is fixed. Demand is spiking because it's the only exit available. So the price goes up. So it's not it's not a complicated thesis, right? It's basic economics that plays out in real time.
So, here's the question that actually matters. Not what's happening in Iran right now. Uh, but what's going to happen to Bitcoin demand over the next 5 to 10 years or 20 years? Because if you believe demand is going one direction and supply is permanently fixed, then you already know where this ends up. Now, I see three massive demand drivers that most people aren't really connecting yet.
Driver one, this one's the obvious one. The world's breaking apart. We're moving from a unipolar world where the US is a dollar denominated, right? Everything, one set of financial rails connect the whole planet to more of a multipolar world. Multiple competing power blocks, multiple reserve currencies. They're all fighting for dominance, right? And in that world, there's more sanctions, more capital controls, more governments weaponizing their financial systems against each other and against their own citizens. And it's not really much of a prediction, right? That's that's already happening, right? We saw Russia sanctioned, Iran sanctioned, Venezuela sanctioned. Every time a government weaponizes its currency or its banking system, more people need an exit that nobody can block. The more the world, I don't know, fragments, the more people need money that works everywhere without asking permission from anyone. That's demand. And that demand doesn't appear to be going down. The world's not becoming more stable. It's becoming less stable. Which means the number of people who need a borderless censorship resistant portable store of value is going in one direction.
All right, driver number two. People people are just moving, right? This one is a little bit less obvious, but I think it's just as powerful. Technology is enabling tens of millions of people to live and work and operate across multiple countries simultaneously. digital nomads, remote workers, people running businesses across borders, people that are running, you know, flag theory, the idea that you could deliberately structure your life across multiple jurisdictions to protect your freedom and your assets. And this isn't like a small fringe movement anymore. This is accelerating. This is a structural shift in how people live. And here's the financial problem it creates. When you live across borders, when your clients are in one country, your banks in another, your assets are in a third, the traditional financial system fights you at every single step, right? Like wire transfers take days. Banks close your account because your activity looks suspicious. Jurisdictions block your incoming transfers. Um, compliance departments decide your money can't move. People living across borders need money that moves the way they do instantly without permission, without a bank deciding whether to approve it. And of course that's Bitcoin and that population is growing every single year. So that's demand.
The third driver, I'll give you just two words. AI agents. Now, I'm not going to get into all that today because this is this probably a whole video that I should do on that. And honestly, it's probably one of the most important videos I'm going to make this year. Now, if you understand what AI agents are and you understand what they need to transact autonomously across the internet, then you already know where I'm going with this. If you want, drop AI agents in the comments if you want me to make that video. If enough of you say it, I'll go ahead and dig in. We'll make that video next.
But here's where we land on this demand picture. A fragmenting multipolar world. Tens of millions of people restructuring their lives across borders. A technology wave that hasn't even started yet. Three separate tailwinds. Three completely different audiences, but all arriving at the same conclusion from three different directions. Fixed supply, rising demand. You don't have to be a mathematician to see where that equation goes.
Now, I don't know for sure, but I would guess Ran's father was not a probably wasn't a naive man, right? He was smart. He was a successful guy. He had made a completely rational decision, but he did it with the best options that he had back in 1979. Gold was the right answer for thousands of years. It's been real money longer than any government's ever existed. So, I'm not here to trash talk gold. It's not about that. It's just that the world changed when his when his moment of truth came at an airport checkpoint in Tyrron with everything that he owned in gold. Gold gold veiled. Not because gold's worthless, but because gold couldn't move.
And so in your moment of truth, if your moment of truth came tomorrow and and not not in Iran, uh not in a war zone, just here, could you could you move your wealth? Now, most high earners I talked to have built a net worth that looks great on paper, like real estate, retirement accounts, business equity, physical assets, and almost none of it can move quickly. Real estate needs months to close, right? In in a good market, your 401k, it's locked. It has withdrawal restrictions and tax penalties. Your business equity is probably completely illquid until, you know, maybe somebody decides to buy your business.
But look, I'm not saying to sell everything. I'm not even saying that you should go all in on anything. What I'm actually asking is a much simpler question. Do you know the portability profile of your wealth? Do you know what you can move in 24 hours, in 48 hours, in a week? Because here's what Iran and Dubai and Venezuela and Ukraine, here's what they all show us in real time. Liquidity isn't just a bid and ask spread on an exchange. Liquidity is whether your wealth can actually reach a buyer when you need it to. The premium goes to the asset that can move. The discount goes to the asset that can't. Now, even if you never have to move your wealth, and I hope and pray that's the case for you, just realize and understand that it's the reality for billions of people on this earth today. And that's enough to push the demand higher.
All right. Now, if you want to understand where these three demand drivers push Bitcoin from a mathematical argument, you might want to watch this next video right here, and I'll see you over there.