I just read an article about a gold trading platform in China that collapsed after gold prices surged. Tens of thousands of people rushed in because gold was doing what gold has done for centuries during uncertainty. Go up. Preserve value. Look serious.
On paper, everyone owned gold.
Then prices jumped again and people tried to cash out.
And suddenly the platform could not pay.
Withdrawals froze. Offices shut. Police showed up. Over a billion dollars either missing or stuck in limbo. Not because gold stopped being valuable. Not because markets broke. But because too many people asked the same innocent question at the same time.
Can I have my money now.
This is the part that always gets skipped.
If you own gold, why does a liquidity crisis matter. If it is really yours, why does anyone need time to arrange delivery. If the price went up, why does redemption depend on whether a company hedged properly or kept enough reserves.
Gold did not fail here. Gold did what it has always done.
The system wrapped around gold did.
Most modern gold ownership is not gold. It is a promise about gold. A number on a screen. A claim. Sometimes a leveraged position marketed as stability, because nothing says conservative like complexity layered on top of something simple.
Verification is hard. Audits take time. Physical delivery is slow and expensive. These are not moral flaws. They are physical ones. So platforms step in to make gold easy. Low minimums. Instant exposure. Click to buy. Click to sell.
Until everyone clicks sell.
Then the thing that was supposed to be boring and safe suddenly behaves like every other financial product. Gates. Delays. Explanations. Investigations. A task force.
At that moment, investors learn something uncomfortable. They were never testing the price of gold. They were testing the plumbing.
That part hit me because I have been on the other side of this.
Years ago, I was a customer of Celsius.
It was not that I did not understand, on paper, that yield is correlated with risk. I did. I had heard that line enough times. But understanding something abstractly is different from living inside a system that constantly reassures you.
It felt safe in the most ordinary way. The app worked. Rewards showed up. Balances updated. When something pays you every day, your brain quietly files it under stable.
Every day, Alex Mashinsky was on his AMAs. Calm. Confident. Convincing. He explained the model, the safeguards, why this was different. Over time, the repetition mattered more than the theory.
I even remember the day I called customer service. I asked if the assets were collateralized. I wanted to be responsible. I wanted to do my due diligence. The answers sounded reasonable. Professional. Enough.
So I shrugged off the discomfort.
Not because I believed there was no risk, but because I believed it was being managed by people who seemed closer to the machinery than I was.
What I had not learned yet was the lesson of self-custody.
I did not own bitcoin. I owned a claim on bitcoin. And as long as nobody asked for it back all at once, everything looked fine.
Until withdrawals froze.
That was the moment it became clear. Not emotionally. Mechanically.
I was not testing the price.
I was testing the plumbing.
This is not a story about bad actors. It is a story about physical constraints.
Gold is heavy. Verification is slow. Settlement does not scale. So, intermediaries appear. And once intermediaries appear, risk concentrates quietly until it does not.
The scandal is not that a platform collapsed. That part is boring. Platforms fail in every asset class. The real lesson is that the thing people reached for as safety worked perfectly as a store of value, but poorly once it was treated like a liquid, digital, always available monetary system.
Which raises an awkward question.
What would money look like if ownership did not depend on a platform surviving a rush for the exit. If verification did not require trust. If settlement did not care about office hours, borders, or permission.
I did not start reading that article looking for Bitcoin.
It showed up anyway.
Born and raised in Medellín, Colombia and now living in Florida, Dalia Platt is one of our bilingual advisers who can support you in English and Spanish. She speaks above of her first-hand experience of learning the hard way and how that taught her to value the properties of Bitcoin. She now shares that knowledge through both her work at The Bitcoin Adviser and via her personal Substack.
Click Meet with Dalia above, complete the contact form and Dalia will reach out to arrange an initial consultation. In the game of financial musical chairs make sure you have somewhere to sit when the music stops.