“Merchants don’t accept Bitcoin” is what we hear but while bitcoin merchant adoption is slowly rising, how many stores actually accept gold, for that matter?

Physical gold is the way to protect yourself from the financial crises that are more frequent than you might think and likely to become more so as the world accumulates and drown in rising debt.

But despite precious metals like gold and silver declared as a legal currency, you just can’t simply run to your local grocery store and buy bread and milk with the yellow metal. For this, you will have to exchange your gold for cash.

"Merchants don't accept #bitcoin" is such a meme at this point. How many stores that you've been to accept gold? — grubles (@notgrubles) March 31, 2019

No doubt there is a number of reasons to make an investment into gold and make it an essential option of your portfolio.

For instance, in countries like Venezuela, we are seeing people selling their gold to buy groceries as the country is going through hyperinflation and lack of food, water and medications amidst political turmoil.

If we talk about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in Venezuela, they have been helping the people to acquire the basic necessities of life as well.

From coffee shops, pubs to small grocery markets to large corporations, in the last few years, Bitcoin has started making its way into the mainstream.

Bitcoin’s meteoric rise that is expected to outdo its previous highs with the next peak, people have taken it to HODL, just like gold, instead of spending it to buy goods or services.

Moreover, despite having low fees, for a small amount of transactions traditional payment options make more sense and have further driven people to keep the flagship cryptocurrency in anticipation of another price hike.

Gold has an $8 trillion market cap with ZERO merchant adoption. #bitcoin will eventually be accepted everywhere because not only is there no cost to the merchant to accept it, but it is greatly margin accretive as the fees are much smaller than 3-4% credit card fees. https://t.co/LrZrGwBO5x — Bitcoin⚡️Munger (@BitcoinMunger) March 31, 2019

However, as second layer solution Lightning Network makes Bitcoin transactions faster, cheaper and scalable, we might see more adoption in the future as we recently saw a new lightning app allowing to buy as mundane as a pizza with Bitcoin.

Still, as it is expected for BTC price to skyrocket the fourth time in the coming years, Bitcoin will become another store of value option for the people, establishing a permanent spot in the portfolio.