I BATTLED Peter Schiff Over Gold Vs. Bitcoin On National TV

0:00Gold versus Bitcoin. This has been a debate for decades. And I sat down with Peter Schiff, the ultimate gold bug on national television. And I asked Peter, if you really believe in what you're saying, make a bet with me. Peter didn't want to do it. And wait till you hear the gold versus Bitcoin debate I had with him on Fox Business yesterday. Take a listen to this. Anthony, Peter says the Bitcoin bubble has burst. OK, since it's all time high back in October of one hundred and twenty six thousand and change, it has come way down. I believe about, you know, it's really been not a pretty picture here.

0:32What makes you think that it's not a bubble and that the bubble has burst? Well, first of all, when you have bubbles, usually what you end up having is an incredible amount of innovation. If you look at the tech bubble, then all of a sudden you've got the tech industry, and that seems to be driving all of the returns. And so the question is, what is your time horizon? And what Bitcoin has shown is that it is the best performing asset over long periods of time. The 10-year compound annual growth rate of Bitcoin is something like 55 or 60 percent. Compare that to gold. It's about 12 percent. So if you're worried about what the return of an asset is going to be over the next year, then you need to go and you need to evaluate stocks, gold, Bitcoin, etc.

1:05But if you're looking over long periods of time, you know, my friend Peter here has a lot of experience. I happen to be a little bit younger than him, though. And so my time horizon is much longer and therefore I like Bitcoin more than gold. I'll say so now we're hitting each other's age. Peter, Bitcoin was under a thousand dollars when you first started to become a critic of it. I remember this. And since then, it has become worth many multiples of that. So at what point does the asset stop being a bubble and becomes an actual asset class? Well, I actually was well below a thousand when I first started criticizing it.

1:36And when Anthony grows up, he'll be criticizing it, too. But, you know, you said that, you know, or Anthony thinks that gold's gold's a paperweight. Well, I mean, you could use gold as a paperweight. It'd be an expensive paperweight. But if you hold a paperweight, I said that's how he writes it. Right. But if you try to use Bitcoin as a paperweight, all your papers would blow away because it doesn't even have that functionality. It's basically nothing. It's not digital gold. It's digital nothing. It's a pyramid. It's, you know, like a Ponzi. People buy it because they think somebody else is going to buy it at a higher price, whereas gold is an actual metal.

2:12It is a precious metal, the most valuable metal that we have, the most useful metal that we have. And, you know, we've seen a pullback in the price of gold since the war broke out. And that's led a lot of people to think, oh, wait a minute, Maybe gold's not a safe haven anymore. It went down. It didn't go up. Gold went up in anticipation of this war. One of the reasons that gold went to 5 ,600 or 4 ,600 or 5 ,600. It went as high as 5 ,600. Yeah, 5 ,600 was gold markets started looking forward to the war. But also gold had a huge run even before that. So by the time the war came around, gold was very overextended, overbought.

2:52It was due for a pullback. and the war ended up being the catalyst more of a you know buy the rumor sell the fact uh but gold is still in a major major bull market uh so is silver silver's had a little bit more volatility gold peter has has performed less well since the war than bitcoin did so that brings me to you anthony sure it's bitcoin looks better than gold since february 27th but that said bitcoin has had extraordinary returns. Unbelievable since it first became a thing in January of 2009. However, it's also suffered multiple massive crashes. I think several of 50 percent or more. That to me is something where you look at an asset that can suffer that kind of retrenchment and that kind of hit.

3:38How is that even good? Forget retirees portfolios for anybody who cares about their money. Well, first of all, I wore today this nice gold tie for Peter here because I wanted him to No, not only do I, I like gold. I think gold is fine. This is just the closest gold is going to get to my portfolio is in my time. That's unfortunate for you. And the reason is because you actually want the volatility, right? One of the misconceptions about volatility is that volatility is bad. But actually what we find is the best returning stocks, the best returning commodities, they are all highly volatile. And so the reason why gold bugs all of a sudden got very excited, Peter and many others, is because all of a sudden gold woke up.

4:12It woke up after being asleep for a decade and said, hey, it's time to be volatile. And so welcome to the party. But Bitcoin, that is the entire asset. It's very volatile. And the reason why you need volatility is because when you get these massive moves up, of course, there's going to be drawdowns and consolidations. But you need to look over a long period of time. And I actually do think that one of the things that the gold bugs and the Bitcoiners agree on is that the government is not going to stop printing money. And also, they think very long term. And so those two things lead you to either gold or Bitcoin.

4:40The truth is that both of them are going to go up. The reason why I'm interested in Bitcoin is I do probably have a longer time horizon given my age. And I want more volatility. I want more potential asymmetry than gold may provide. Well, look, volatility doesn't guarantee that it's going to keep going up. I mean, it's certainly not a strength that Bitcoin can collapse by 50, 60, 70 percent. Now, yes, in its past, there have been times where it's done that. But there is no real long term for Bitcoin. It's been around 16 years or 17 years. So it doesn't have a real long term. And the problem is most of the people who are in Bitcoin weren't in it back then.

5:15They don't have the big gains. Bitcoin is really no higher than it was five years ago. It's just been going sideways as all the money has been pouring in. The early money has been getting out all the hype, all of the Bitcoin treasury companies, all of the ETFs, all that buying has simply allowed the people who got in early to cash out. That's what's been going on. You're a libertarian. And the whole at least initial attraction and still is for many people about Bitcoin is that the government doesn't touch it. There is no currency intervention by any government. Therefore, I would think that you would embrace that.

5:51Well, I mean, look, I mean, P.T. Barton was a great capitalist. He said there's a sucker born every day. I'm not saying that people can't go to the circus and see the fat lady or whatever, the bearded bearded lady. So I have no problem if people want to gamble on Bitcoin just because it was invented privately doesn't mean that I think it's a good idea. There's a lot of bad ideas. But the government, unfortunately, now the government is backing Bitcoin. The government is behind Bitcoin. The government is trying to misdirect resources into Bitcoin. The president's family. That's the family business.

6:27Now, forget real estate. They're all in crypto. Well, hold on a second. Hold on a second here. The U.S. government has been backing gold for decades and decades. I don't hear you complaining about that. Second of all, the United States money in the United States. Hold on a second. Second of all is that the United States has frozen Venezuelan's gold. They've frozen Russia's gold. They've gone after China's gold. Only if they have possession of it. And again, but you can't do that with an asset that cannot be censored. What do you mean? Look at all the Bitcoin we've seized. How do you think we have a Bitcoin strategic reserve?

6:56It's all the seized Bitcoin. There was just some rumors, I don't know, that we seized Iran's Bitcoin or whatever they had. It's a lot harder to seize gold because if you have your own gold in a vault, unless you're going to send the military on the ground to get it. Gold is far more secure. Let me ask you this. Over the next decade, do you think that Bitcoin or gold is going to outperform each other? If you had to pick between gold and Bitcoin, which one do you think is going to be? I don't even know if Bitcoin is going to be around in another decade. You want to make a bet on it? Bet what? If Bitcoin is going to be around in a decade?

7:24Bet a bar of gold. Oh, holy hell. Everybody always wants to bet me. That's an easy bet. If you think it's going to go away, let's make a little bet. Well, I can't. It's not going to go to zero, maybe. Okay, so Bitcoin is not going to zero. Let's see. We're making progress. A huge part of Bitcoin's recent run up has a lot to do with the administration being incredibly open armed to it. And President Trump had said he wanted to be the crypto president. He's very much involved in it. He hawks his own coin. Melania, the first lady, hawks a coin. His kids are involved in Bitcoin companies, et cetera.

7:58At what point does Bitcoin become exactly the very system that it was supposed to push against? Yeah, look, one of the things that politicians are very good at is they're very good at hearing what people think that they want and then going and saying, I support that thing. It happens on the right, happens on the left. Politicians understand this game very well. And it's very funny because four or five years ago, every politician pretty much hated this stuff. All of a sudden, Trump admits Republicans and Democrats, they all love it all of a sudden. The reason is because the voice of the people, they got paid to pay to promote it.

8:29They got nobody is paying them to promote. He got donations. Of course, the crypto community was the biggest donors in the last election cycle. They're pying off all these politicians trying to get them to bail out Bitcoin and prop up Bitcoin. You know, because, you know, the big promoter was Michael Saylor and strategy. And now look what's happening over there. You know, first he used to sell his stock at a premium so he can go in and buy Bitcoin and created what he called the Bitcoin yield. and then he couldn't do that anymore. So then he started borrowing money, issuing preferred shares, bribing people 10, 11, 11 and a half percent so he can get money to buy Bitcoin.

9:07Now he can't do any of that anymore because the preferreds are trying to get a discount. So now he's sacrificing his own shareholders by destroying value to sell his stock into the market at a discount to buy Bitcoin and creating a negative Bitcoin yield. So this whole fly reel is running backwards. The stock strategy is down about 67 percent over the past year. Right now it's up 6 percent. Let me finish with this. What about stocks? When you look at the performance of gold versus the S &P, Bitcoin versus the S &P, depending on the time horizon and the comparison, I mean, stocks over the long term since 1929 have returned much better than just about anything else.

9:50You still like stocks? I think that that is true over very long periods of time. But actually, interestingly, if you go and you look over like a three to 10 year period, gold and Bitcoin have both been outperforming stocks, which is exactly opposite of what most people would think. They think the productive assets can outperform. And so that's where I say that, you know, Peter, sometimes it takes a little while for people to kind of come around here. I do think one day, Peter, but maybe the thing I'll leave you with, Liz, is that I like stocks. I like Bitcoin. But Peter is the only person on here who sells gold and accepts Bitcoin.

10:19There's no Bitcoiners accepting gold. We don't actually take any of the Bitcoin. But Liz, there's a big difference between stocks and gold. They're very different assets. Stocks are income generating businesses or they're operating companies. And I like stocks if I can buy them at the right price. The problem is sometimes stocks are very expensive. And when they're very expensive, historically, you get a very bad return if you overpay. In fact, so far this century, because if you bought into the stock market, 1999, 2000, gold has outperformed the stock market, even including the dividends over the last 26, 27 years, because if you bought, then you overpaid.

10:57And I think if you're buying into the stock market now, just the overall market, you are overpaying. You are paying the highest valuation ever for U.S. stocks. And historically, that is not a good thing to do. OK, you know who hates both Bitcoin and gold? Warren Buffett. So we'll end on that. Warren doesn't like gold and he does not like Bitcoin. Great to have you both. Can we do this again in a couple of months? I'm happy to come and kick his butt anytime you want, Liz. All right, there you have it. Peter Schiff, he loves gold. I don't hate gold. I like Bitcoin though. And Peter, he may not believe Bitcoin's actually going to zero or he would have bet me.

11:30Peter Schiff saying that Bitcoin's not going to zero. That's progress, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you guys so much for watching today. Please remember to subscribe on YouTube. My goal is to get to 1 million subscribers. so hit the button and I'll see all of you live from the desk of Anthony Pompliano tomorrow.