Gold has endured for five thousand years. Bitcoin has existed for fifteen. One is the oldest store of value in human history; the other is a protocol no government controls. At the Adviser 3.0 2026 conference, moderator Laurentius van den Worm, Head of Investment Strategy at Timeline, brought both camps together on the Sunset Studio stage for a structured debate that didn't pretend there were easy answers.
On one side: Dan Parkinson, the Bitcoin IFA, who watched Lebanon's currency lose 99.9% of its purchasing power in three years and came back to the UK convinced that financial advisers need to understand what sound money actually looks like. On the other: Thomas Holl, Portfolio Manager at BlackRock, who has spent nearly two decades managing gold strategies and believes the case for hard assets has never been stronger. Neither pulled their punches.
From Lebanon to the Adviser Market
Dan Parkinson's path to Bitcoin advocacy began not in a trading room but in a refugee camp. After leaving a successful career in ad tech, he moved to Lebanon to volunteer teaching English and football, and arrived just as the Lebanese lira was collapsing. In the space of three days, he watched 60% of his purchasing power evaporate. Over the next three years, the lira lost 99.9% of its value against the dollar. The people who weren't panicking were the ones holding Bitcoin.
He retrained as a financial adviser, came back to the UK, and concluded that the standard 60/40 portfolio wasn't serving clients well enough. Now he works to train advisers across the profession, arguing that understanding Bitcoin is becoming a professional obligation.
"The only variable between the Lebanese lira losing 99.9% of its value in three years and the US dollar losing 99.9% of its value in a hundred years is time."
Thomas Holl's story is less dramatic but no less purposeful. Nearly two decades managing natural resources and gold strategies at BlackRock left him with a settled conviction: the conventional wisdom about what constitutes a safe asset is badly wrong. Cash, he argues, is not low risk. In a world of sustained fiscal excess, it is one of the highest-risk things you can hold.
Defining the Assets
Laurentius pressed Thomas early on to define where gold actually sits in a portfolio. His answer was precise: a zero coupon inflation-protected perpetual bond with zero issuer or sovereign risk. No income, no growth, no counterparty. What it does offer is a claim on real purchasing power that no government can default on.
That sovereign risk framing has sharpened in recent years. After Russia's exclusion from the dollar-based financial system in 2022, central bank gold purchases around the world doubled almost overnight. The implicit message was clear: assets held inside the system can be frozen. Gold held outside cannot.
"Gold is a zero coupon inflation-protected perpetual bond with zero issuer or sovereign risk."
Dan frames Bitcoin differently. It is not gold's digital equivalent; it is a hedge against money printing. The relationship is mechanical: when the Fed expands its balance sheet, Bitcoin tends to perform. When it contracts, Bitcoin struggles. Over any four-year period to date, Bitcoin has delivered positive returns 99.8% of the time. And at roughly five percent global adoption, he argues, the technology is at roughly the same stage the internet was in 1990. The largest gains on any new technology come in the early majority phase. We are not there yet.
Volatility, Allocation, and Practical Advice
The debate moved on to the question every adviser in the room was waiting for: how much, and how? Dan was clear that while the answer varies with life stage and risk appetite, the starting point should simply be to get off zero. Even a one percent allocation, he argued, has historically improved Sharpe ratios and long-term returns without meaningfully increasing portfolio volatility. Bitcoin's 30-day average volatility in 2025 was around 40%, roughly in line with several of the Magnificent Seven stocks, and well below Nvidia and Tesla.
He also made a regulatory point that every adviser needs to take seriously: you cannot advise on Bitcoin. It remains a restricted mass-market investment, not protected by the FSCS scheme. Advisers can educate and facilitate informed conversations, but formal advice is off the table for now. That will change. The question is whether firms are ready when it does.
"Fix the roof while the sun is shining. You don't want to be playing catch up when the regulation changes, and it will."
Thomas addressed the practicalities of gold access in equal detail. Physical coins and bars remain viable, with sovereigns CGT-free as legal tender. ETFs now offer exposure at single-digit basis points, fully audited with bar numbers accessible. And the next wave of demand, he suggested, may come through tokenised gold on crypto networks — making gold divisible and transmissible in a way that physical never could be, opening it to entirely new markets.
The Bigger Picture
Both guests pushed back on what Thomas called the "single line item mindset" — judging assets in isolation rather than asking what they contribute to the portfolio as a whole. Gold has had multi-decade periods of underperformance. Bitcoin has endured brutal bear markets. Neither is a free lunch. But in a world where the Human Rights Foundation estimates 86% of the global population lives under conditions of currency instability or financial repression, both assets represent something the traditional system cannot easily replicate: a claim on value that exists outside government control.
The Kumbaya moment arrived late. When pressed on valuation, both guests essentially agreed: neither gold nor Bitcoin can be valued with precision. Markets are driven by buyers and sellers, not quant models. What both assets share is a structural tailwind from governments that show no credible path to fiscal restraint. For advisers willing to engage seriously with that reality, the conversation is just getting started.