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? Bitcoin may be digital, but it’s got nothing in common with gold.

— Peter Schiff (@PeterSchiff) May 5, 2025

But this may be a specious argument.

Peter Schiff Doesn’t 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

Michael Saylor on Gold vs Fiat vs #Bitcoin pic.twitter.com/nzWFgV1BfP

— Vivek (@Vivek4real_) March 9, 2025

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, it’s done even better than the yellow metal over most time spans relevant to most kinds of investors.

The foreign equities and gold bug investor with over a billion dollars in assets under management took a big swipe at Bitcoin and Michael Saylor’s BTC-accumulating finance company, formerly named MicroStrategy.

He said Strategy will go bankrupt over Bitcoin. But if this is reverse psychology, it must be working on Saylor. His company still hasn’t stopped racing other firms for more BTC in whale-sized bites.

Peter Schiff Pulls No Punches on BTC in X Spaces Gag

To start off the program, Schiff said Bitcoin’s promoters sold it as a kind of digital gold, but it hasn’t performed like the precious metal at all, so the “marketing” was a “fraud.”

“The idea that it’s digital gold has been destroyed because it trades nothing like gold. It’s just some kind of risk asset.”

But, Bitcoin’s promoters did not say it would perform as an investment with ROIs like gold. They said it is similar in its economic properties to the metal because of its limited supply and the difficulty and cost of securing it.

While it is true that Bitcoin’s price lately has not traded like gold, that’s because over timescales very relevant to individual investors it has performed fantastically better than the yellow metal.

Bitcoin vs. Gold ROIs 2009-10 to Present

INSIGHT: Gold’s growth is strong, but Bitcoin’s massive gains can’t be ignored.

Gold just hit a new ATH of $3,310, while Bitcoin is consolidating. But when we zoom out, BTC’s epic rise far outpaces gold’s performance.

What’s your prediction? pic.twitter.com/1OkHGXltp5

— Coin Bureau (@coinbureau) April 16, 2025

Some fraud that would be to explain to a judge:

Sorry, we told the litigant that the product was like an instrument that delivered 230% ROI in 16 years since 2009, and it only delivered 2.82 billion percent since 2010.

On the X podcast, Schiff asked:

“What purpose does Bitcoin serve? We got plenty of risk assets out there. It’s a super risk asset that’s going to go up faster than other risk assets. Based on what?”

He added, “At least a tech stock- there’s the story there of future earnings that could materialize, you’re buying a business that could earn money.”

Bitcoin provides a banking service, which is traditionally a very profitable, high-growth business because everyone needs it every day in a market economy.

Moreover, Bitcoin does so in a way that is simple and fundamentally useful. It is proven to work reliably, fairly, transparently, and easily for anyone to use.

Bitcoin’s price was up 36% over the trailing 12 months in mid-April.