This is a segment from The Breakdown newsletter. To read more editions, subscribe

“We are what we repeatedly do.”

— Aristotle

Central banks are buying gold in the 21st century for the same reason Romans bought it in the first: It has value because people perceive it to have value. 

That circular logic has proved so durable that the purchasing power of gold is virtually unchanged since antiquity.

In that sense, central banks are buying gold now because Romans were buying it then.

Perception has become reality through repetition.

The bet with crypto is that it can pull off the same trick, but faster — compressing millennia of belief into a few short…

Read more on Blockworks