Schiff’s Gold Standard Tantrum: Why Bitcoin Leaves Precious Metals in the Dust

Peter Schiff’s latest anti-Bitcoin rant claims crypto can’t compete with gold’s ’intrinsic value’—a tired argument from a man who still thinks fax machines are peak technology.

Here’s what he misses: Bitcoin isn’t trying to be gold. It’s the programmable, borderless, hyper-scarce asset that cuts through central bank nonsense like a hot knife through quantitative easing.

Gold bugs cling to their shiny rock while Bitcoin’s network effect grows exponentially. The real ’intrinsic value’? A system that bypasses Wall Street gatekeepers and their 2% management fees for the crime of underperforming the S&P 500.

Wake up, Peter—your safe haven just got digitally disrupted.

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.