Nick Szabo  🔑

Weight or control is not why central banks hold gold, and it wouldn't be why they'd buy Bitcoin.

A central bank holds gold because they need a portion of their reserves that is trust-minimized and therefore a fallback to and anti-correlated with trust-based assets like government bonds and foreign currencies.

Once their need for trust minimization (which varies greatly depending on their political circumstances) outweighs the risks from Bitcoin's greater volatility, they will start to switch -- the ones with the greatest such needs much sooner than the ones with the least, naturally.

How would you characterize the difference between states with a need for high vs. low trust minimization?

The biggest ones for gold vs. Bitcoin are likely the physical security and extra-constitutional political instability. With good key management control over Bitcoin can be much more closely mapped to political legitimacy and much less vulnerable to physical invasion than gold.