Yield

Yield is the income an asset pays its holder, expressed as a percentage of price per year, as with a 10-year US Treasury paying in the neighborhood of 4 percent in the mid-2020s. Neither gold nor bitcoin has native yield: both are bearer assets whose return comes entirely from price change.

Why it matters

Yield is the opportunity cost meter for non-yielding assets. When real interest rates rise, holding gold or bitcoin means visibly forgoing income, and both have historically struggled in such regimes; when real yields fall or go negative, the penalty disappears and hard assets shine. Warren Buffett's famous critique, that gold just sits there producing nothing, applies with equal force to bitcoin, and partisans of both assets have spent decades answering it.

Schemes offering yield on these assets, gold leasing or crypto lending, generate it by adding counterparty risk. The collapses of Celsius and BlockFi in 2022 showed what that yield actually priced.

In the gold vs bitcoin debate

Here the two assets stand on the same side of the argument. Advocates reframe zero yield as purity: yield is compensation for risk taken, and an asset that is nobody's liability has no risk to compensate. The shared practical lesson is that chasing yield on either asset means surrendering custody, which is historically where the losses in both markets have come from.