Peter Schiff Says Bitcoin Is Nothing Like Gold: Is That True? (Opinion)

The Euro Pacific Capital founder and chief strategist pointed out that gold rose 3% over the previous weekend from Friday until Monday. Meanwhile, the average BTC price fell by 3%. The investment wizard left it to the reader to conclude that Bitcoin cannot be a digital version of gold.

Gold rose over $90 today. That‘s a 3% gain from Friday’s close. Over the same time period Bitcoin fell by 3%. How can something that is claimed to be a digital version of gold, trade like the mirror image of gold？

But this may be a specious argument.

Peter Schiff Doesnt Give Bitcoin Credit

The representatives of Bitcoin in online communities compare it to gold, but by analogy. Nobody but Peter Schiff seems to be confused about whether BTC is some kind of gold certificate or ETF.

The analogy to the yellow metal begins in the seminal Bitcoin white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto. Describing how the BTC network creates new supplies of the currency, he wrote on Oct 31, 2008:

“The steady addition of a constant of amount of new coins is analogous to gold miners expending resources to add gold to circulation. In our case, it is CPU time and electricity that is expended.”

In other words, Bitcoin has a limited supply and any network participant must spend the electricity and computer runtime the BTC app requires in order to produce a new coin.

The Digital Gold Thesis Lives On

Later in the comment thread on his original post, Schiff wrote:

“Gold is 100% intrinsic value. Bitcoin is 100% faith.”

But gold does not have intrinsic value. It has instrumental value as a financial commodity because of the specific properties of its nature and the economy of our planet.

The rarity, durability, fungibility, and chemical identifiability of gold make it a financial classic of human civilization. The creator(s) of Bitcoin designed it to instantiate all four of those properties in a free, open, public, borderless, computer network database.

As for BTC vs. gold in terms of their performance as financial investments, Bitcoin was built to give its bearers relief from overheated central bank printing presses. Traditionally, folks like Mr. Schiff used gold for that purpose.

But Bitcoin hasn‘t failed so far to live up to gold’s reputation as a fiat shelter. In fact, its done even better than the yellow metal over most time spans relevant to most kinds of investors.