Why Peter Schiff Hates Bitcoin & The Bull Case for Gold

Why does Bitcoin sucks and is inferior to Gold? Peter Schiff is a financial commentator and economist that is relentlessly bullish on gold and a famous skeptic of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. He covers a ton of ground in this podcast, from what money really is, why gold can't be disrupted as the ultimate store of value, why we should abolish the Federal Reserve and principles to grow your wealth. ------ 🎬 DEBRIEF | Ryan & David Unpacking the Episode: https://www.bankless.com/debrief-the-peter-schiff-interview ------ 📣 SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🦄UNISWAP | BROWSER EXTENSION https://bankless.cc/uniswap ⚡️ CARTESI | LINUX-POWERED ROLLUPS https://bankless.cc/CartesiGovernance 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT https://bankless.cc/toku ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x0c294913a7596b427add7dcbd6d7bbfc7338d53f/59?referrer=0x077Fe9e96Aa9b20Bd36F1C6290f54F8717C5674E ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 7:07 What is Money? 15:05 Why is Gold the Apex Money? 27:59 Gold vs. Bitcoin Custody 36:27 Gold in The Internet Age 43:08 Gold as a Productive Asset 49:30 Gold vs. Bitcoin Demographics 53:90 Can Gold be Disrupted? 1:04:20 Should we Abolish The Federal Reserve? 1:13:33 Is the Stock Market Overpriced? 1:20:09 Principles to Grow Wealth 1:25:30 Steelmanning Crypto 1:36:17 Closing & Disclaimers ------ RESOURCES Peter Schiff https://x.com/PeterSchiff Peter Schiff Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@peterschiff SchiffGold https://www.schiffgold.com/ ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures ⁠

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Cigarettes are money in prisons, right? Not all the prisoners smoke, but some do. And that gives the cigarettes value because you can smoke them. But nobody could smoke Bitcoin, right? So there's, there's, there's no use there. I mean, people are smoking something who are buying Bitcoin. But you know, Bitcoin is not the next evolution. Bitcoin is a step backwards.

• 0:24David Hoffman?

  Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. And today we're exploring not a frontier, we're going back to the world of gold. We've got Peter Schiff on the podcast today. If you do not already know who Peter Schiff is, he's kind of a character. He's been memed pretty hard by the crypto industry as this guy who just refuses to be bullish on Bitcoin.

• 0:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, David, Peter just loves gold. I mean, he cannot get enough gold. He loves gold the way Michael Saylor loves Bitcoin, but like maybe even more so. I would love to see those two guys debate, by the way.

• 0:56David Hoffman?

  Oh my God, that would be something. That would be something. There are some things that we agree about with Peter Schiff, like the value of hard money, the basement of fiat currencies. But of course, we differ very widely on his stance towards Bitcoin and crypto. Since Peter's points are already well known by many in the space, we didn't spend too much energy refuting his takes about Bitcoin. We instead just chose to listen and press on in the conversation. We touched on Bitcoin versus gold, of course, but also his takes on US fiscal policy. If we should abolish the Fed, what Schiff would do if he were president and some other fun questions like that.

• 1:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  My big question going into this episode, actually, David was like, how does Peter store his gold? And so we asked that in the beginning, right? Basically, like he was talking about like, you know, he actually mails. He has customers who buy his gold coins. He actually mails them via like mail service to their house as the transport.

• 1:49David Hoffman?

  You must have had that part when my internet cut out for like 10 minutes. Because I disappeared from the middle of this podcast because my power went out.

• 1:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  David had to disappear at the beginning of the podcast. So it's just me solo like quizzing Peter on like how he stores his gold, what is recommended, how he transports all of these things. So it's just kind of like, it felt very from a crypto perspective, anachronistic almost like, why are we doing this? But anyway, you and I have a lot to unpack during the debrief. I can fill you in on that, the portion of the podcast that you missed. For Bankless Citizens, that is the episode that David and I record after the episode. It's available for you on the Bankless Premium feed, which is fantastic. That's where I listen to you or re-listen to all of the Bankless episodes. In Spotify is my preferred way of doing that. No commercials, has these extra debrief episodes and so much more. So if you want to upgrade

• 2:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  to Bankless Citizenship, there is a link in the show notes. Guys, we're getting right to the episode with Peter Schiff on gold and why Bitcoin sucks. His words, not ours. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including our recommended exchange. You can't buy gold on there, but you can buy some Bitcoin.

• 2:56David Hoffman?

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• 3:00David Hoffman?

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• 3:42David Hoffman?

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• 4:27David Hoffman?

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• 5:10David Hoffman?

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• 5:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, I'm very excited to introduce you for the first time on Bankless to Peter Schiff. He is a financial commentator. He's an economist. He's got some outspoken views on, I would say, a lot of things, but like the global economy, financial markets, shortcomings of the government and their policies, fiat currency, a lot of things he's short on. But unlike most fiat critics you've probably heard on this podcast on Bankless, Peter is relentlessly bullish, not on Bitcoin, not on crypto, but on gold. I think he's an overall skeptic on cryptocurrency, so there's a ton to talk about today. Peter, welcome to Bankless.

• 6:15Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me on, guys. And yeah, I mean, I'm not just a skeptic on Bitcoin. I mean, I know it's not going to work, but gold does.

• 6:22David Hoffman?

  Zing, we're starting there, huh?

• 6:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, gold does. I mean, gold's real money. So for all the people who are rightly concerned, like I am, about fiat currency, about central banks and inflation and all the debt, and they're looking for an alternative, that they want a real store of value that can also be, you know, a medium of exchange and a unit of account, you don't have to reinvent the wheel. You know, gold works just fine. And in fact, it works even better, thanks to modern technology like the internet, like blockchain, that have the potential to make gold an even better medium of exchange than it has been in the past.

• 7:08David Hoffman?

  Peter, you said gold is real money. What is real money? What is money to you? How are you defining this money?

• 7:14Speaker 00

  Well, I don't, I don't have my own definition. I just look at classic definitions. So what money is, is the most marketable commodity. Because you have to look back at the origin of money. You know, where did it come from? You know, we didn't always have money. And so before we had money, humans traded through barter. And, and so in barter, if I had a good that you wanted and you had a good that I wanted, you know, we could exchange. And we would both benefit. But that's very cumbersome, because you need a confluence of needs. I have to want what you have and you have to want what I have. And if we don't, we can't trade. And, and so eventually societies discovered

• 7:56Speaker 00

  that you could take one commodity that everybody could accept in exchange for whatever they had. Even if you didn't need that commodity, you knew that somebody else would. And, and so that was the invention of money, where people would accept a commodity, not because they needed it, but because they knew somebody else might need it and they could hold on to it. But in order to be money, there were a lot of characteristics that a commodity would have to have. And that excluded most commodities from being viable money. But a lot of different commodities over the centuries were tried. But the one that was the most successful over the centuries was gold.

• 8:37Speaker 00

  And gold beat out other forms of money in a competitive free market. And you know, the characteristics that you have, gold is portable, it's divisible, it's immutable. You know, it doesn't decay. So it has all these things that money has to have. And because it doesn't decay, it's a store of value. So if I accept gold in exchange for my goods or services, I can hold on to the gold for a while. I don't need to immediately, you know, turn around and exchange it. I can hold on to it a year later, five years later, and it's just as valuable as the day I received it.

• 9:21Speaker 00

  So, you know, but Bitcoin, what they tried to do with Bitcoin is they copied a lot of the qualities that made gold a better form of money than other commodities. But they left out the most important aspect of the whole thing was the underlying value of the commodity itself. Because money has to be an actual commodity. So it's an actual good that has value in and of itself. Right? And Bitcoin doesn't have that. Bitcoin just has these properties without the underlying value. And without the value, you can't be a store of value because you have nothing to store. See, in that sense, Bitcoin has a lot in common with fiat.

• 10:05Speaker 00

  See, legitimate currency is currency that's backed by actual money.

• 10:11Speaker 00

  And that was the, the original currency was backed by real money because nobody would just take paper. But because the paper was backed by gold, it was really a warehouse receipt for gold. People accepted paper because they knew they can go to the warehouse and get the gold. It was an IOU, evidence of ownership for gold. Governments eventually figured out how to create fiat currency, which was backed by nothing. They would mandate that it was legal tender and people would use it. They would, they would demand it as payment of taxes, which is like a tribute to, to the government. But at the end of the day, what really gives fiat currency value, it's not just the government decree, it's confidence, it's faith.

• 10:55Speaker 00

  People have to believe that it will be accepted in the future, the way it's accepted in the present. So it's, it's really that belief set that gives it value. Government helps create that belief, right? And get people to believe in it because it's got the backing of a government. But plenty of governments have seen their currencies wiped out. They, they go to zero when the confidence is lost. And so Bitcoin has that aspect in, in common. It, it's all based on confidence. It doesn't get its value the way gold does, which is because it's a metal that people need. Look, I put on, I knew I was gonna be on this podcast. I got, you know, a gold bracelet on, a gold, uh, watch, I got rings. You're, you're bling it up.

• 11:39Speaker 00

  It's actually super impressive. Right, I mean, but, but gold is a real thing and it's not just used, you know, as jewelry. It's used in electronics, it's used in dentistry, it's used in aerospace. I mean, it would be used even more, uh, but it's too expensive, right? But it, it, it's for most of the jobs that other metals are doing, gold could actually do it better. But, you know, gold only goes to its highest and best use because it is so scarce, uh, so people only use it if they have to. But Bitcoin, nobody has to use Bitcoin for anything because you can't use it for anything. So it's, it's just a, a token that people, uh, buy because they hope somebody else

• 12:20Speaker 00

  buys it at a higher price. Well, there's, there's thousands of other tokens that are like that, tens of thousands, actually. And there's no limit to how many can be created in the future. You know, they may have a different name than Bitcoin, but other than that, you know, and they may even be better in a sense that, you know, if, you know, they may be cheaper, you know, faster, you know, to use or, you know, in fact, they've already come up with, with cryptos that are better. But as far as I'm concerned, none of them have any value. What the future of blockchain is going to be backing it by real money. So just like legitimate currency was backed by real money, you could have a cryptocurrency that's also backed by

• 13:05Speaker 00

  real money. You could theoretically tokenize gold, but the tokens that you're creating themselves are not gold. They're just tokens. But what they can do is they can represent ownership of gold. And so instead of me sending you my gold, you know, which, you know, I have to, you know, put it in the mail and ship it to you if you're not, you know, right here where I can hand it to you. Instead of giving you the gold, I can just give you my ownership of that gold by transferring the, you know, that ownership to you digitally, which I could do instantaneously at basically zero cost. So it's a lot more efficient than, than transferring Bitcoin. The difference is when I transfer gold ownership to you, I'm giving you something.

• 13:50Speaker 00

  When I, when I transfer my Bitcoin, I'm giving you nothing. I'm just giving you the hope that you have that you'll be able to make a similar transfer with an even greater fool at some point in the future. So that's basically the bottom line. And just, you know, one thing, people try to say that gold, that Bitcoin is digital gold. And it's no more digital gold than a, a image of a hamburger is digital food. Right? I mean, you can't eat digital food. You know, you're gonna, you're gonna starve to death if your only diet is, is digital food. So that's the same thing with gold. You know, gold has to be physical because the properties of gold are physical. I can't make jewelry without physical gold.

• 14:34Speaker 00

  I can't conduct electricity without physical gold, right? Gold needs to be physical. There are some things that can be digital. Music can be digital. I can listen to digital music, you know, just, just as easily as listening to a, a record. Right? Uh, I could read a book digitally. I don't need to have the actual physical book in my hand. I could read the words. Uh, so some things, you know, could be digital. But other thing like, things like food, uh, and, uh, and, um, and gold can't.

• 15:05David Hoffman?

  So Peter, you, uh, we on Bankless, we have told the story of like the anthropological journey of money a handful of times. This is honestly like one of my favorite stories. These ideas that societies will come up with their own monies internally. Then these societies will discover each other and then their two monies will compete and one will end up on top. And gold is the one, the, the apex predator of this competition for money. I think it's one of the more fascinating stories about money that exists. But that begs the question, why is gold the final destination? Why is gold the final equilibrium of this Darwinian fight to be the best money? Why does it have to stop at gold? Why can't there be something in the future that surpasses gold as so many have surpassed other monies over time? Why is gold the final destination?

• 15:48Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, you know, it, it's been the best form of money for hundreds of years and nothing has, has come around that, that's, that's been better. But look, you know, you can use other things as money. It doesn't have to be gold. Uh, and you know, you could use other things as money. I mean, they, you know, I'm, I'm not against other commodities. If people want to use them as money, they can, right? I mean, look, you know, cigarettes are money in prisons, right? Not all the prisoners smoke, but some do. And that gives the cigarettes value because you can smoke them. But nobody could smoke Bitcoin, right? So there's, there's, there's, there's no use there. I mean, people are smoking something who are buying Bitcoin.

• 16:31Speaker 00

  But Bitcoin is not the next evolution. Bitcoin is a step backwards when it comes to, if anybody was to look at it. I mean, look, they've been trying to come up with gold. You know, the alchemists of their day were trying to come up with it. This is just the latest iteration of that. It's called fool's gold. You know, just because it's on the blockchain, you know, doesn't change the dynamic. I call it a blockchain letter, which is really what it is, right? That's what's new. It's just a newer way to repackage an old con, which is a pyramid scheme. Chain letter, Ponzi. I mean, those are the words that describe what's going on with Bitcoin. I will grant it that as far as Ponzi's go or pyramids,

• 17:15Speaker 00

  this is one of the most successful ones there's been. Maybe it's the most successful. Maybe it's going to go on for a while longer. Maybe it's already peaked. I mean, I know that Bitcoin is down over 30% from its peak almost three years ago in terms of gold. So I think that says a lot that despite all the hype that we've seen in the last few years, you know, El Salvador, Michael Saylor's, all the ETFs. First Bitcoin, Ethereum, NFTs, Super Bowl ads. You know, all this stuff, Wall Street coming in, Republican convention. You know, let's get the US government to use taxpayer money to buy Bitcoin.

• 17:59Speaker 00

  All that, they've thrown everything at Bitcoin and it's not making new highs. So that's got to tell you that there's some serious money that's been selling Bitcoin for the last few years. My guess is the people who are selling it are a lot smarter than the people who are buying it. And they probably bought it a long time ago and knew they were going to hype it up. And hats off to them, you know, they succeeded. But now in order to really complete, they have to get out, right? Because you have to turn your paper wealth into real, real wealth. You know, you want to buy things with your Bitcoin, you got to sell the Bitcoin first. And, and so that's what's going on. But I feel sorry for a lot of the people who are buying now, who have bought over the last Few years who are gonna lose a lot of money.

• 18:43Speaker 00

  These are the bag holders in any pyramid scheme. It's the people that come in at the end. They're the ones that make it possible for the people that came in at the beginning to make money. Right, there's no, there's no real money being made here. It's just a transfer. Wealth is transferred from the people who sell the Bitcoin or from the people who buy the Bitcoin to the people who sell it. And it's actually a negative sum game because you know, you have to cut in the miners. And there's a whole cottage industry built around hyping up Bitcoin. Uh, so it's not even a zero sum game. It's a negative sum game. If you think of it that way, because it's like a casino with a huge rake. Because there's, there's so many people grabbing money out of the pot.

• 19:25Speaker 00

  That at the end of the day, even, even some of the winners end up losing.

• 19:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so Peter, your explanation for like why Bitcoin like so, uh, you know, some people would hear what you said and be like, well, you know, gold has had 10,000 years or whatever through civilization Bitcoin, Bitcoin has had 15 years and it's 1.2 trillion dollars in value. I mean, for 15 years old, that's not too shabby. What is that like 15% of the market cap of gold, something to that effect?

• 19:49Speaker 00

  You're making my point. I mean, Bitcoin's only been around for 15 years. Talk to me in a thousand years, let's see if it's still around.

• 19:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  We're gonna be around a thousand years, Peter? What do you, what do you know that I don't?

• 20:01Speaker 00

  Well, I don't know. Well, AI is coming, right? Maybe it'll make us immortal, but.

• 20:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, well, I, I have a few questions. So it seems like the crux of your argument, and by the way, uh, I guess we'll get right to the, you know, crypto Bitcoin versus gold kind of conversation immediately. But, um, like we, we have some other things we want to talk about. But you know, one of your main points about Bitcoin is that there's no underlying sort of utility, let's say, right? So gold you can use in electronics. Gold has some, uh, consumption good value. It's sort of a commodity in that way. One use case for Bitcoin is actually you, you pay Bitcoin on the network in order to send Bitcoins. So I guess in a way that's sort of a utility, right?

• 20:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, but the question is, yes, yes, if I, if I, I can send you my Bitcoin. I've, I've acknowledged that, but a lot of that is dependent on a market for Bitcoin in the future, which there may not be.

• 20:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Fair enough. So that's somewhat recursive. I get it.

• 20:53Speaker 00

  But the question is.

• 20:56Speaker 00

  There are other blockchains where I can do the same thing with their token. Ethereum. And so it's not like, I mean, gold does things that other metals simply can't. And, and that's where gold is used. Uh, where other metals can do it, maybe not as good, that they, they use other metals because gold's too, too expensive. Um, but I don't see that with, with, with Bitcoin. And it would be, it would be very rare. Yeah. I mean, look, even think, think about it this way. I mean, when you search, are you using spy glass or American, you know, I mean, I can't even remember some of the earlier, uh, you know, search engines. I mean, even Yahoo was a big one. Actually, I, I don't Google anymore. I use ChatGPT.

• 21:41Speaker 00

  Chat, well, yeah. I was really good at for my phone. In fact, I agree with you. I'm already not using Google as much as I'm using ChatGPT for a lot of things. So, I mean, how, do you still have a MySpace account? I mean, Facebook took over that and then Instagram came along, TikTok came along. Uh, you know, you're, you're always coming up with something better. So to say that Satoshi, right, came up with Bitcoin, whatever it was, 13, 14 years ago, and nothing will be better. That, that is the greatest cryptocurrency that will ever be created from now until the end of time, and nothing is going to improve on that. I mean, it's this nonsense that's never happened. That the first TV is not the best TV. The first phone was not the best phone.

• 22:24Speaker 00

  The first car, the first plane, anything that man invents, man can make better. Man did not invent gold. God did. It came from the supernova, right? You know, it's been here since the beginning of time. Uh, and, and so that's different than technology that always gets better with human ingenuity. And, and, and there's also, you know, things. Things are fads, right? People all of a sudden, you know, people don't stuff phone booths anymore. I mean, they don't even have phone booths, but they don't have pet rocks, you know? And, and one day they won't have Bitcoin. You know, it's just like it's popular now.

• 22:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Peter, there are cryptocurrencies that have more utility, right? So one of which you've, you've named, it has an ETF as well. It's called Ethereum. And so that actually has some induced demand outside of the Ethereum economy. In other words, like you could do tokenized treasuries. You can even do tokenized gold on Ethereum when you pay to move that tokenized gold or you, you create a smart contract.

• 23:19Speaker 00

  Yes, tokenized gold has value.

• 23:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  But, but, but you're paying some gas fees and that goes into the value. That, that creates a utility value inside of Ethereum. Do you think that has a chance to be a store of value like gold does?

• 23:31Speaker 00

  Except tokenized gold actually works better on other blockchains where the gas is a fraction of the cost of Bitcoin. So just because I created a gold token, I don't need the Ethereum blockchain in order to have it. I can use other blockchains that are more competitive. And, and so, yeah, I'm not saying that there's no value in blockchain whatsoever. But it's the tokens, these native tokens that are of dubious value.

• 23:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I get it.

• 23:58Speaker 00

  And is it possible that Bitcoin's value is something above zero? Yeah. I mean, if you want to argue that it has some value that's not zero, I'm not going to, you know, argue a lot that maybe it has some value above zero. But it's not, it's not $60,000 above zero. I don't think it's anywhere close to that number. Look, I created an NFT and I stuck it on, it was not an NFT, an ordinal, and I put it on the Bitcoin blockchain.

• 24:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Good for you.

• 24:26Speaker 00

  You can go buy it at what Magic Eden is called Gold, Gold, Golden Triumph. I sold like a hundred of these things, but you could go on there and buy them. There's a secondary market for them. But when I initially sold them, you got a signed original print with my signature on it with your ordinal. So you actually had something real that you can hang on your wall and it was scarce. And then I only made a hundred of them and I've never made another one since. So it's the first and only. The Peter Schiff original painting, and that's also an ordinal, our print. We actually made an original painting and no one's bought that yet. I didn't get a high enough price for the painting, so I kept it. But we sold the print.

• 25:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, see, people like digital things like this. Okay, so another piece of your argument, you said, what gives fiat currency values? People have to believe, isn't that the thing that gives all monetary units value? Isn't the thing that gives Bitcoin value or even gold value? Is you have kind of consensus belief that this is a good instrument to store your value? You don't think that this is all a coordination consensus game all the way down?

• 25:35Speaker 00

  No, because you don't have to believe in an actual commodity like gold. Gold has value because of its monetary properties that are so useful to man or woman. You know, human humans. Now, some humans may value gold more than others, right? But there is value there that is undeniable.

• 26:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, that's like a floor value. This, it's got like a commodity value that's worth what? I don't know, 1 trillion, 1.2 trillion? Everything above that is like, you know, it's monetary value.

• 26:10Speaker 00

  The idea that the value of gold, right? I hear this from the Bitcoin people all the time, that only 10% or whatever of gold's market cap is because of its metal and the rest is because it's money, which is not even close to true because nobody other than central banks are even using it as money today. Yes, people are storing gold as a store of value. But they're storing that gold because there is real demand in the future for that gold. Somebody ultimately is going to use that gold. They may not be alive yet, but they're gonna need it. And in fact, we're actually discovering more uses for gold all the time.

• 26:55Speaker 00

  There are more uses for gold today than there were 100 years ago, than there were 1,000 years ago. And of course, there's more people. But so the gold that we have today, today's price represents the present value of its use into the future in perpetuity. So no other commodity really is like that because no other commodity is gonna be here that long into the future, but gold will. And so I would say that the monetary premium that gold might have extra to its price is probably as small as it's ever been. And that's one of the reasons that I think that the price is still so low. I think that there's very little premium built into the price of gold right now.

• 27:40Speaker 00

  Uh, because it's not being used as money. I think it will be. In fact, I think the world is gonna re-monetize gold. I think we're gonna go back on the gold standard. I mean, I think there's no other way this fiat experiment is gonna end other than a return to gold. And when that happens, gold's price is gonna have to be much, much higher than it is today.

• 27:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  One other thing I, I wanna understand from you. So when you talk about, you know, gold and it's virtues, how do you advise that people actually hold their gold? There's multiple ways to hold it, right? You, you mentioned, you know, tokenized gold on a blockchain could be one, but you also said that was an IOU. You know, you can buy gold ETFs. That's an, that's an IOU as well, as well. Do you advise that people like hold gold bars and custody it themselves? Or like buy these instruments and IOUs? Or like what, what's the preferred method?

• 28:26Speaker 00

  Well, I've got, I've got Shift Gold, uh, backdrop. In fact, I actually were using the wrong backdrop. It's supposed to say dot com on it. Oh, it does. I was blocking it up. See, schiffgold.com. But, um, so, um, so Shift Gold, uh, sells gold that we actually ship out to you so that you can store it yourself.

• 28:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like gold bars, like actual nuggets or gold bars or something like this?

• 28:47Speaker 00

  People buy coins. Yeah, we sell coins and bars. Um, and some coins, coins legally have to be made by a government. And so we sell a lot of gold. Coins, but we also sell

• 28:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  They legally have to be made by a government?

• 29:01Speaker 00

  In order to be legally called a coin, right? A private mint can make, can make, take gold and make it into a round little object. But you can't call it a coin unless it's legal tender.

• 29:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Really?

• 29:12Speaker 00

  And a lot of the gold, you know, a lot of gold coins are legal tender somewhere. They're legal tender in the US, in Canada, in Australia, you know, wherever they're made. But you can still, a, a, a private mint can, can mint a round, you know, just call it a round, right? As opposed to a coin. Uh, but we sell, you know, gold bars and coins, silver directly. And I, I recommend that people have physical gold and silver, you know, in their possession. Especially if you, you know, if you're, you know, prepping for some kind of gloom and doom scenario, uh, which could happen, hyperinflation or

• 29:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  But like, how much, can you actually hold this in size? Like, let's say I want to buy like, um, you know, $250,000 worth of like, uh, gold coins. I mean, how much does that weigh? Like, I'm not, I don't know if I'm comfortable.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  You can put, you can put it, you can put it in a shoebox and still have a lot of room left over.

• 30:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  And like, you, you would mail that to my house and just like

• 30:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Through UPS or something?

• 30:09Speaker 00

  It's shipped and insured.

• 30:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  And they're not gonna open that $250,000 package?

• 30:13Speaker 00

  No, we have, you know, we've been selling gold at Schiff Gold for over a decade and none of it's ever been lost, none of it's ever been stolen. It always arrives. You know, obviously they don't write on there, you know, gold inside, but it is very heavy, especially if you buy silver. Silver is bulky.

• 30:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 30:29Speaker 00

  You know, I had, I had a Schiff Gold customer bought $300,000 worth of silver during the pandemic and they had to ship it to my house and he came and picked it up because they wouldn't ship to him. So I was in Puerto Rico. But, I mean, it was, I mean, it took up a lot of space to bring it. But again, if it was gold, he could have put it in a shoebox and it would have been, been no big deal.

• 30:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, wait, so 300,000?

• 30:50Speaker 00

  You know, one of the reasons that gold is better money is because it's a hell of a lot easier to store, uh, than other metals, like even silver. But I mean, imagine storing copper, right? How much space you need? You need a warehouse to have that much copper.

• 31:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  It'd be terrible. And by, by the way, this is a reason I just like, I've stayed away from kind of the, the gold game or the commodities game. It's just like custody is so difficult. But like, say, say I wanted to buy

• 31:12Speaker 00

  Well, not with gold.

• 31:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not with gold? But 300,000, $300,000 worth of gold, like what's, how do I secure that in like my own custody?

• 31:20Speaker 00

  Well, look. I mean, you can hide it somewhere in your house. Just don't forget where you put it, or you can have a safe, you know, and put it in there. Just don't lose the combination. Don't lose your combination or lose your keys. But look, it's probably a lot easier. Look, what little Bitcoin I have, I lost because I don't have my seed phrase. I didn't buy it. I got some Bitcoin gifted to me, but it's all lost. So, I mean, you can lose Bitcoin. I've lost, you know, you can lose gold. I mean, you could lose anything, right? But also, if you want to buy it and have a third-party store, you know, Shift Gold could arrange storage in Switzerland, in Dubai, in Singapore. You can have your gold stored, reputedly, around the world if you don't want to store it yourself.

• 32:03Speaker 00

  You could also use Wall Street products. You could buy ETFs that hold gold. And then, yes, you don't own the gold directly. You own a share of a public entity that owns the gold. That's what some people are doing with Bitcoin. It's like kind of ironic that the whole selling point of Bitcoin was that it's self-custody, no third parties. And now all the demand is coming from third parties in custody of your Bitcoin and charge you a storage fee. But yeah, people are buying Bitcoin ETFs. So, you know, there's gold ETFs.

• 32:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, this is one thing. Would you concede that this is one thing that Bitcoin or cryptocurrency has over gold? And that it's more portable over the Internet? So like you were mentioning, hey, I could put this gold in a shoebox or I could bury it somewhere in my house. I could put it in a vault. Well, with Bitcoin, you can have like a 12-seed phrase brain wallet, basically. Just like memorize those 12 words and you could take it anywhere in the world.

• 32:58Speaker 00

  Yes, I mean, that is a very interesting.

• 33:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's kind of cool, right?

• 33:05Speaker 00

  But the problem is, the reason that it's so easy to send Bitcoin is because you're sending nothing, right? So the minute I'm sending nothing. Nothing is a lot easier to send than something. Gold is an actual thing. And so obviously, I can't send you the actual thing that has weight and substance. You know, until we have like the transporters, you know, like they had in Star Trek. You know, once they have that, then I can take my bar of gold and beam it over to you, right? And then it's just as, just as, uh, just as easy to move.

• 33:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think you're getting caught up on this physical element that just like doesn't seem as important. I think to a lot of like people listening or maybe younger generations where like, we would say it has, um, physical substance and weight like on the internet, you know, digitally. I mean, actually, the, the fact that it has, um, that gold has like physical, uh, characteristics in the real world is sort of a negative property to me. It means it could get stolen. It means-

• 34:01Speaker 00

  No, that's what, that's what makes it money. Remember, we started the conversation. It has to be a commodity. Because Bitcoin could just collapse at any point in time. The reason it's not collapsing yet is because you still have more people wanting to buy it than who want to sell it. So on balance, there's, you know, there's enough buying to support the market. But we do know that everybody who owns Bitcoin needs to sell. They don't have to sell all of it, but they have to sell some of it. People who own Bitcoin have to eat, you know, they, they gotta pay their rent, right? They, they gotta travel. They gotta do things. And if they have Bitcoin and they need to sell the Bitcoin to do those things.

• 34:45Speaker 00

  So there's, all the people who own Bitcoin are going to be selling Bitcoin.

• 34:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 34:49Speaker 00

  And so you have to get new people who don't own Bitcoin to come in and buy it. And as long as that's going on, you know, the price doesn't collapse. But it's, there's going to be a point where you don't have enough money coming in to enable the money to go out.

• 35:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sure.

• 35:05Speaker 00

  And, and then the whole thing implodes, which is what-

• 35:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, I get that. It's a younger asset, of course. I would say the same is true of, of gold, which is you have to have interested buyers in order to prop this whole thing up.

• 35:15Speaker 00

  You have industries.

• 35:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  One advantage I think that gold has, and I think that a lot of listeners will appreciate, um, is basically it's, it has, uh, thousands of years of history behind it in terms of prominence.

• 35:26Speaker 00

  History. There are industries right now.

• 35:30Speaker 00

  That need gold, that buy gold all the time because they need it.

• 35:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and then there's a physical real world demand, that's great, yeah.

• 35:37Speaker 00

  There's a huge industry. Now, you know, I know with the internet, a lot of guys have digital girlfriends now. So maybe you can give them digital gold. But if you want to have a girlfriend in the real world, you know, you're going to be getting her real jewelry.

• 35:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 35:52Speaker 00

  And it can't be made out of Bitcoin, right? They're going to want gold jewelry. And so there's, there's industries that are buying gold right now. And if the price of gold goes down, those industries are going to say, oh, I'm going to buy my gold right today. The price went down. I need gold. Let me take advantage of it. Nobody is going to be like, oh my God, Bitcoin is cheaper. I need, let me buy the Bitcoin that I need. Because you don't need Bitcoin. It's like, the only thing, the reason that people want it is because the price is going up. And so when the price stops going up, there's no reason to buy it. And then everybody wants to get rid of it and there's.

• 36:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  There's this industrial use case for gold. There's also, I suppose, an ornamental use case for gold too that you're talking about here. I want to ask you another question, something to come back to is, so you said the internet actually makes gold better. In what ways does the internet make gold better? Because I would think it's just like what we're talking about now is exchanging IOUs. We're not talking about exchanging a bearer instrument. So if you talk about tokenized gold or something, that's just like a less good product versus just like actually owning the gold yourself and having a true bearer instrument. So what about the internet makes gold better?

• 37:00Speaker 00

  Well, it's a good question. So paper made gold better too. Initially, when it was legitimate. So it is not that easy, right? For me to hand you my bar of gold, right? Because it's a big physical bar, right? And maybe I want to buy something that doesn't cost as much as my whole bar. I mean, how do I deal with it, right? I can't just, you know, just like shave it off and you don't know how much I've just taken. But they had coins, you know, for, you know, they made gold coins smaller and then they made coins out of silver and other metals. But private enterprise came up with the idea of a note currency where a bank.

• 37:40Speaker 00

  Private bank, although it started probably with the goldsmiths. That would be storing gold and that would issue a warehouse receipt for that gold. In the form of an IOU, a claim check. Like when you go and you check your coat. And they give you a little piece of paper. That is a receipt for the coat that they're storing, right? And so the same thing would happen with gold, but people realize that, you know what? Instead of going down to the blacksmith and getting the gold, it's a long trip on my horse to get over there. Why don't you just, I'll just give you my claim check and now you have the right to get the gold. You can go down and pick it up whenever you want, right? Why should we make all these trips to get the gold? Just take this warehouse receipt, right? And so that would circulate.

• 38:25Speaker 00

  And then banks did that. Private banks would hold the gold in their vault. And they would give their customers bills, paper that were IOUs. That were more fungible, that were more easily divisible and exchangeable and portable than the gold itself. And so these pieces of paper, this note currency. Derived its value from the gold, it had no intrinsic value on its own. But because it was backed by gold. It was now a superior form of money and we called it a money substitute in economics. The internet improves on that even more. Because now, instead of the bank giving you a bill, a piece of paper, which is still physical, right? In nature.

• 39:10Speaker 00

  They now issue you a digital token. Which can now live on a blockchain or either public or private or however you want to do it. And you don't even need a blockchain, you can still just digitally represent it. But there's all sorts of ways. That we can now tokenize ownership of gold. Or utilize the internet to make it even easier for me to transfer my ownership of gold to you. And so because of this new technology, gold works even better than it's ever worked as a medium of exchange. It's faster, it's more divisible.

• 39:50Speaker 00

  It's it's less expensive. So this is the evolution. The problem is, a lot of people have assumed that, oh, now we have blockchain. We don't need gold anymore because we could just create Bitcoin. No, that that is not, you know, the solution. Gold is going to exist long after Bitcoin is dead, but gold may still be living on a blockchain.

• 40:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  But that's settlement for like, you know, even tokenized gold or just like, you know, gold ETFs or something like that. That has so much trust implication because you're trusting whoever's issuing it actually has the gold that backs it. You know, you're trusting the the overall legal system to protect your property rights. It is just like incomparable to actually owning physical gold and being able to self custody.

• 40:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, when you own when you own physical gold, yes, that's why you don't want to have all of your gold in that way, right? But you want to keep your gold that you store with a highly respectable third party that you can trust. Maybe the third party also has insurance in case the gold is lost or stolen. And there's a reputable insurance company that stands behind it and maybe a reinsurance company. You know, trust is a big part of the capitalist system. We wouldn't have an insurance industry without trust. I mean, everybody has insurance. You have life insurance, health insurance, fire insurance. All of this is trusting the insurance company that is going to pay you when you put in a claim.

• 41:19Speaker 00

  Right? I mean, so and so how do you know? How do you know, can I trust this counterparty? Well, you you have agencies that rate the companies. You have reviews, right? You know, other people's experiences, did they pay their claims? Do they not pay their claims? So you do research. So the same thing would happen with gold, and it was happening. People have trusted their third parties to hold their gold for thousands of years. It's worked.

• 41:45Speaker 00

  But yeah, I mean, that is a an argument about Bitcoin is you don't have to trust the third party. And I will grant it that if you self custody your Bitcoin, not the ETFs, if you self custody Bitcoin, you don't have to trust. A third party to hold it, but you still have to trust. You have to trust the market that people still want it. You have to have trust in this scheme continuing. And I don't want to do that. I mean, I'd rather own gold that I don't have to trust and then trust the custodian than not have a custodian, but have to trust that the thing that I'm holding is still going to have value because it may not. It's all about perception.

• 42:26Speaker 00

  And even if it has some value, like even if Bitcoin is worth a thousand dollars a token, I doubt it's worth that much, right? And when I'm talking about worth, I'm not talking about price, right? The market price is whatever some idiot will pay, right? So right now, you know, fools are paying, you know, $58,000, whatever for a Bitcoin. But let's say the actual value is a thousand, if it's that high. I mean, that means you're going to lose a tremendous amount of money if you buy it at 58,000. I mean, if you buy your Bitcoin at 58,000 and it goes to a thousand, it might as well go to zero because you've already lost 99% of your money, right? That the last little bit is going to be a small consolation to you if you buy it.

• 43:08David Hoffman?

  Peter, the difference that you like to emphasize between gold and Bitcoin is the fact that like some industries truly need gold. They must buy gold in order to produce whatever products that they are producing. It's got inherent demand from industries who has equity. These have equities and that equity is productive because this industry must be buying gold to produce a product and then they're selling that product at a higher price than all of the costs it went to produce that product. And so there's some productivity happening, some economy, some commerce is happening. So why do you have, if that's the part about gold that you truly like, is there are productive companies that are turning it into a greater value so they can sell a product?

• 43:50David Hoffman?

  Why so much interest in gold instead of the productive companies that are producing like cash flowing dividends or yield? Well, if that's the argument that you like about gold over Bitcoin, why not just go straight for the productive asset side of the investment?

• 44:05Speaker 00

  Well, I'm doing that. In fact, I have a lot more of my own money in. Gold mining companies than I do in the gold that they're mining. Now, of course, when I own a gold mining stock, I own a share of all that unmined gold that's in the ground, which obviously is not worth as much as the gold that's already been mined, because there's a lot of unknowns there with respect to extracting it. But, yeah, I mean, I like gold mining stocks. I think they're very inexpensive historically relative to gold. And I think that people will make a lot of money in these stocks. But there's a lot more risk there than in just owning gold. I mean, I look at gold as a money, right?

• 44:48Speaker 00

  So gold, to me, competes with dollars, competes with euros, yen, and other currencies that are also functioning as money, right? Or as a money substitute. I think gold is superior. And if people save gold in the future, they'll have a lot more buying power than if they hoard these other fiat currencies that governments are creating. Gold mining stocks are businesses. So they compete with other businesses that you could invest in. You know, and they're not just the only commodity. You can buy oil companies. You could buy agricultural companies. So, and, you know, all kinds of businesses. And I have a lot of different types of stocks in my portfolio.

• 45:32Speaker 00

  It's just that my largest area of concentration is the mining sector. And, you know, that has, that's been a mistake because some of my other sectors have done better over the years because I think, you know, these stocks are still so cheap. But, yeah, I do advocate it because I do think if gold does what I think it's going to do, which is go from 2,500, where it is now, to, you know, 20,000, 30,000, wherever it's going to go. I think that the percentage gains in the mining stocks is going to be much, much greater. I mean, orders of magnitude greater, especially if it gets there quickly. And I do think that once gold starts to move, it's going to be a quick repricing at

• 46:17Speaker 00

  a much higher level. And so that's going to be a huge shock to the earnings and valuations of these companies. And Wall Street is way under invested in these mining stocks. So I think it's a real opportunity. Now, it doesn't come without risk, and you know, I could be wrong, right? I've been wrong about stuff. And so, you know, you have to be prepared. I think that if you buy gold, it's very hard to lose money buying gold. I mean, very hard. In fact, nobody who's bought gold, you know, with the exception of a few people, maybe, are down, right? Gold's at an all-time record high. I mean, it's at 2,500, 2,490 as I speak. It's down a bit today. But the highest it's been is 2,530.

• 46:59Speaker 00

  So, I mean, nobody can be down more than a percent or so. You know, as opposed to, you know, just about everything else, people, you know, can be way down depending on when they bought it. But so it's hard, and even if gold pulls back. I mean, gold's been rising when this century started in the year 2000, 2001, gold was 270. Gold's gone up more than eightfold this century. The Dow's gone up fourfold from like 10,000 to 40,000. So you've had a much bigger move. You go back to the origin of the Federal Reserve in 1913, gold was $20 an ounce. So now it's 2,500. The dollar's lost more than 99% of its value.

• 47:43Speaker 00

  So gold is a safe store of value. Gold mining companies can go bankrupt. They're businesses. They have all kinds of operational risks associated with them. There's political risks too. Governments can come in and nationalize the mine. You know, you can have a, a mine can collapse. You know, people die, they sue the company, the mine goes out of production. I mean, all kinds of... Gold mining is probably one of the riskiest businesses you can get into. So many things can go wrong, and of course, they do go wrong, right? That's Murphy's Law. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong, especially if you own a gold mine. So it's, you know, it's a tough business. I know, I got all the... The battle scars, but I do think that ultimately people are going to make a ton of money.

• 48:26Speaker 00

  So if you're, you know, a Bitcoiner and you've got dreams of riches because you think your Bitcoins going to the moon. If you want to take a shot on a moon shot, that's where you ought to be. Forget about gold, buy the mining stocks, best thing to do, be diversified, get a portfolio. Again, you don't have to reinvent the wheel. I got the portfolio, the Euro Pacific Gold Fund managed by Adrian Day. I think he's the best guy in the business, been doing it 30, 40 years. I picked him for a reason to manage my fund. I knew I didn't know enough about gold to manage it myself. Not gold, the companies that mine it. He's the best. And so he's mine in my, uh, he's managing my fund. You can buy it no load. If you have a discount brokerage firm, uh, EPIGX is the no load.

• 49:11Speaker 00

  It's the investor's advisors class, uh, Europe Pacific Gold Fund, but that's where you should go. You know, you should get rid of that Bitcoin.

• 49:20Speaker 00

  You're, you're, you're gambling in the wrong casino. You're going to lose.

• 49:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  I, I, I do love your passion for gold, Peter.

• 49:25Speaker 00

  Get into gold stocks, at least you, at least you got a good shot at, uh, and making a lot of money.

• 49:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. So maybe one last question. So, so I, I think you'll find a lot of people listening to this podcast just in crypto. It's like bullish on gold relative to fiat. Like it's a great, it's a great asset, particularly if you think governments will continue to print money. And like they will, right? Anyone who's listening to Bankless sort of knows this, you know, this, uh, Peter. One question for you though, like last question on, on gold, maybe versus crypto. Are you worried that the demographics are not in your favor? So it's sort of like a old young type thing. So when I talk to like colleagues, you know, millennials, you know, Gen Z, these sorts of things. They're not necessarily wearing the gold watch or the gold chain, right?

• 50:08Speaker 00

  Sure they are.

• 50:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Internet native. I mean, some of them are like in parts, but like not really. They're internet native. They, they find gold kind of like bulky. What if the demographics just aren't in your favor? So they hear everything you're saying about a non-sovereign store of value. And they're just like, oh, cool Bitcoin or gold, Bitcoin or gold, crypto or gold. Uh, crypto makes sense for me. And do you, do you see this from like younger generations? And do you think that could be headwinds against kind of the, the gold use case? Cause it's a consensus. It's a store of value consensus. People have to want to store their value in gold in order for it to accrue that monetary premium.

• 50:43Speaker 00

  First of all, even if they don't wear gold, they have gold in their cell phones or other electronics and things like that. They don't even realize that they own gold. But I think the demographics work in my favor because all these young people are gonna get older. And as they get older, they get wiser. They learn from their mistakes. So, all these 20-somethings that are into Bitcoin, when they're in their 40s, they'll be into gold. Right? So, I know that the demographics favor gold because people get older, they don't get younger. And they get wiser, they don't get dumber, right? As you get older. You know, every generation thinks that they know more than the generations before them. Everybody thinks that, aha!

• 51:28Speaker 00

  You know, because you're young and you're naive. You don't know, right? And I'm sure that when you're older and you have kids or grandkids and they're telling you about the next fad,

• 51:39Speaker 00

  and you'll say, "You know, let me tell you something, son." You ever hear something called Bitcoin? You know, "Ah, yeah, let me tell you how I lost all my money in Bitcoin." And, you know, "I've been there, done that." So, let me try to save you from yourself. And they'll say, "Ah, what do you know, pops? You're too old, you're...

• 51:57Speaker 00

  This is new." So, yeah, no, this has come and gone. Nothing is new, as I said. It's just a repackaged scam scheme that's fallen apart, you know, over and over again, every time it's been tried. You know, it doesn't matter how you repackage it, you know? It is what it is.

• 52:16David Hoffman?

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• 53:01David Hoffman?

  Launching a token? Don't let complex legal and tax issues slow you down. Toku provides specialized support to optimize your launch and ensure that you as a founder and your team and your investors get the most tax efficient outcomes. The Toku team understands the crypto space inside and out and will ensure your token launch is fully compliant while maximizing tax efficiency. Toku can connect you with the best attorneys if you need them to make sure that you have the best advice. And Toku can help optimize your taxes so you pay the least possible amount of taxes while still maintaining legal compliance. With Toku's guidance, you can concentrate on building your company while Toku handles the logistics. Token launches don't have to be complicated. Talk to Toku today to get a free initial token valuation. Peter, as a technology develops, we have new tools, new materials that we can build our devices with.

• 53:46David Hoffman?

  I just checked GPT to how much gold there is in an iPhone and it's roughly 0.034 grams, which comes about to $2.33. So there's $2.33 of gold in an iPhone.

• 53:59Speaker 00

  Okay. How much Bitcoin is in that iPhone?

• 54:04David Hoffman?

  It depends on the iPhone.

• 54:06Speaker 00

  And you know what? When the price of gold goes up 10x, there'll be $23 worth of gold in there.

• 54:14David Hoffman?

  What about the possibility that via technology we are able to come up with, for whatever reasons we are using gold in our devices, that we find new technologies to use a cheaper commodity, a cheaper material to do that same job that gold is doing? I, without having done any research, I would imagine that that has been the arc that technology has produced. It produces solutions that are cheaper than the previous solutions. So if, if gold indeed does go up 10x and there is now $24 instead of $2.4, doesn't that just incentivize us to use even less gold and find ways around it? And I, I don't think gold will always be a part of industry.

• 54:52Speaker 00

  Remember, other, other metals are going up too, right? It's not just gold, but yes, I mean, to the extent that they can substitute something, but sometimes they can't. You know, there was, I forget that, the, the, uh, it was a big giant telescope they sent up to space. And it had these huge mirrors around the telescope. And they coated them all with gold. And very expensive to coat these huge mirrors with gold. Why didn't they go for something cheaper? Because it wasn't gonna work. They needed the gold. And believe me, even if the price of gold goes up tenfold, it's still such a small part of that iPhone. You think they're gonna say, ah, you know, we can't afford this $24 worth of gold in our $1,200 iPhone?

• 55:36Speaker 00

  You know, it's still not nearly expensive enough to warrant substitution. Because if they said, look, you know, we gotta charge you extra $20 on your iPhone because, you know, gold went up. You're not gonna not buy it. It'd have to go up so much more before those kind of use cases. But there's probably other use cases where the gold is a bigger portion. Look, if gold went up tenfold, they'd make a lot less gold jewelry. I mean, you know, they wouldn't make as much 18 karat. They'd make 14 karat. I mean, yeah, because people couldn't afford to buy it anymore. I mean, you know, rich people, sure. If you were really rich, you could still get all gold jewelry. But if you're not so rich, you might not be able to buy... In fact, I think if the price of gold goes up enough,

• 56:20Speaker 00

  a lot of people are gonna take their jewelry and to a pawn shop and sell it because they're gonna need the money, right? And that's gonna happen as gold prices go up. People will find gold that they don't need anymore and they'll turn it into cash. So that's gonna happen. But it's not gonna... The only thing that would really change it is if somehow the computer is so smart that it could just make gold, you know, out of thin air. Like just somehow concoct it into existence. But if it can do that, it can concoct anything and nobody's gonna need any money. We'll all be rich, right? Well, that'll be the end of everything, right? Because nobody will need to work. Nobody will need any money. So nobody will need gold. We'll be able to have whatever we want because we'll be able to magically create it

• 57:05Speaker 00

  out of the atmosphere just by asking for it. But, you know, I don't know when that day is gonna come.

• 57:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Peter, you take a very dim view on Bitcoin and crypto. I understand that. You're also, though, a libertarian, right? So are you comfortable with just the free market letting these monetary experiments play out? Or like, would you go as far, it's a pyramid scheme. Should a government make it illegal? Bitcoin illegal, crypto illegal? Do you think that they should do that?

• 57:31Speaker 00

  No, of course not. I mean, look, people have a right to do whatever they want with their money, including losing it, throwing it away, right? I believe people have a right to gamble. I wouldn't outlaw, you know, sports betting, or, you know, blackjack, or poker, right? But what I do think should be illegal, and it already is, is fraud. And so to the extent that there are some companies out there that are defrauding people, that are making misrepresentations about Bitcoin, and people end up losing money because they were lied to, I think that, you know, they should be able to, you know, bring these actions in court, and they will. I think that a lot of people are going to end up getting sued over Bitcoin.

• 58:15Speaker 00

  I think there's a lot of people who haven't disclosed a lot of conflicts of interest, especially these financial networks that, you know, are really just infomercials for Bitcoin, who are being paid to promote Bitcoin, and how they screen their guests to make sure that nobody is really critical of Bitcoin, and they put on like, all these people to promote it, because that's what the adverti... I think there's going to be a lot of people who end up, you know, looking for some kind of a redress, who were really, you know, sold a bill of goods. But, you know, caveat emptor, to a large degree, you know, people who lose money are going to be responsible for their losses.

• 58:56Speaker 00

  And, yeah, I don't, you know, I don't think the government should get involved. Now, I don't like all this anti-money laundering. Stuff, I think it's over the top what they do. I think it's an invasion of privacy. And it's not because I want to protect criminals. It's because I want to protect law abiding citizens from government. I don't want government to be so intrusive. And I don't want the government to know everything about us. Because the more the government knows about us, the more likely they will become, you know, a totalitarian type government. Because we enable it. We make it a lot easier for the government to control the people. As, you know, the people lose all their privacy and they know everything about us. So I don't think that these rules, I don't like these rules being applied to Bitcoin. But I don't like them being applied to banking.

• 59:40Speaker 00

  I don't like them being applied to other transactions. But clearly, you know, they're gonna apply all these AML and KYC and other rules. They're gonna be applied to Bitcoin because they're already applied. So I, I object to it in general, not just, you know, against, against Bitcoin. I don't think Bitcoin is a security, but who knows? Maybe one day they'll change their mind and say it is a security. A lot of the tokens to me look like they are securities, even under the way the government defines them legitimately with the Howey test.

• 1:00:15Speaker 00

  But, you know, there's, there's gonna be a lot more regulation on Bitcoin. I mean, there's more regulation on everything. And, and that again, just further undermines the use case. You know, when I first learned about Bitcoin, which was a long time ago, and I would be a lot richer today if I'd only bought it. I did contemplate buying it. I ended up not doing it. And, and, you know, but when it was originally presented to me, it was all, hey, this is anonymous. This lets you get around all this government rules and regulations. You know, you, you know, you, you know, all the censors. So you can use it to buy things you're not supposed to buy. And you can be anonymous on the internet and you can transact. And that was like one of the good things about it.

• 1:00:59Speaker 00

  And yeah, it was decentralized. You self custody it. It's, you can use it to buy, buy things. It's very cheap. Because way back when I heard about it, yeah, I mean, it was, it was very cheap to send what your Bitcoin, because hardly anybody was using the network. So it was, wasn't very congested, right? So all those things that I actually liked about it, it doesn't even have anymore. But the reason I ultimately didn't buy it was because I said, you know, A, it's not real, it can't work. I said, what's to stop somebody from coming up with another cryptocurrency? And, well, nothing, it's open sourced, anybody can copy it and make another one. And, because at the time I knew about Bitcoin, that's all there was was Bitcoin.

• 1:01:43Speaker 00

  But they didn't have all these other altcoins. Um, but now they're, exactly what I was concerned about happening, happened. But I remember thinking like, you know, this could catch on, I mean, people could confuse this with gold. I mean, it's, you know, it's got these interesting characteristics and, uh, you know, I just didn't perceive at that time, obviously, that, you know, it could grow to the scale that it has. And, you know, that everybody would, or this many people would get involved, that Wall Street would get involved. And by the time they kind of did, right? When I first started noticing that, hey, this was more popular, is in 2017 when it went up to 1,000.

• 1:02:26Speaker 00

  And then, you know, it pulled back down, you know, 200, 300. And I remember thinking about it then, because then I had some other friends, some hedge fund guys, I knew people that were buying it. I was like, hell, these are smart people that are buying it. I said, maybe, you know, probably gonna go up the chart, it looks like it's performing at base. And I thought about buying it again, just for a trade. I didn't believe in it, but I thought it would probably go up because enough people were buying it. But I was like, you know what, I didn't want to buy it at a dollar or whatever, so I'm not paying 300 or whatever the hell it was, you know, whatever. I first thought about it. And, and so I didn't buy it then either. But I don't even consider buying it now, it's not even like something that I would contemplate uh, as a trade. And that hasn't been the case for a while, because it's now so popular, so widespread,

• 1:03:11Speaker 00

  that the upside is gone. I mean, even if I thought Bitcoin could go to 100,000, right? Which it still hasn't done, right? But even if I've been going to go to 100,000 or 200,000. So what? It's at almost 60,000. There's not enough upside to make it interesting relative to the risk that it collapses. I would much rather put my spec money in these gold mining stocks where I think they can go up 20x, 50x. Uh, yeah, they might go down 50, 60, 70%. They might, but there's so much upside relative to the downside. That's the bet I want to make, not Bitcoin. Yeah, there was a lot of upside in Bitcoin way back when. I didn't appreciate how much initially.

• 1:03:55Speaker 00

  I didn't realize that this many people would be this dumb. Uh, but you know, I was wrong. Once again, I, I overestimate the intelligence of the average investor. But you know, the people who didn't get in, you know, and I think that's where the big money got in. When it was 300, 400, 500 back then, I think some big money got in. Uh, and then they, they spent a lot of money hyping it up and they did an excellent job of promoting the hell out of it.

• 1:04:20David Hoffman?

  Peter, I want to, I want to get us back onto some, uh, foundation that I, that I know we share. Uh, and I actually kind of want to just like dive straight into this one. Should we abolish the Federal Reserve? And if so, why?

• 1:04:32Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, it's a good question. And my answer is it depends, right? It depends on what we're going to replace it with. So if we abolish the Federal Reserve and replace it with nothing, and we go back to what we had before the Federal Reserve, I'm all for it.

• 1:04:48David Hoffman?

  What we had before the Federal Reserve is a bunch of regional banks?

• 1:04:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, they were privately owned banks that issued paper currency backed by gold, you know? And there was no one, there was no one bank that was, you know, sanctioned above any others. It was all free market competition. It was, it was real capitalism, uh, before the Fed was introduced. And even in the early years of the Fed, you know, it, it, up until the 1920s, it did a pretty good job. Right? It kind of, it went off the rails in the, in the 1920s. But for the initially, the initial time, it, it, you know, it was okay. And the initial Federal Reserve Charter, the initial, when they, when they launched the Federal Reserve, all Federal Reserve notes had to be backed by gold, 40% gold.

• 1:05:35Speaker 00

  They had to be backed 100% by commercial paper. So they would rediscount commercial paper of other banks, and then they had to back it by gold, which meant that the Federal Reserve notes were actually superior to most of the notes that circulated before the Fed. And the Federal Reserve was not allowed to buy any government bonds. Not only couldn't it buy government bonds, it couldn't even own government bonds. On their balance sheet, they were not, they were prohibited from owning government bonds. So that kind of Fed was not that bad. But the problem is, it's the camel's nose under the tent. Once they got that Federal Reserve, it didn't take long before they completely changed it, just like the income tax. They got, we got the income tax in the same year. It was supposed to be a tiny tax, 1, 2, 3, top was 4% on the millionaires and billionaires.

• 1:06:20Speaker 00

  The average person was never conceived to be paying the income tax. Now, the average person pays a much higher rate than the billionaires paid back then. And so it's always a bait and switch, camel's nose under the tent. So if we can go back to what we had before the Fed, yeah, we definitely want to abolish it. The, the problem would be abolishing the Fed and just handing the printing press over to the Congress and say, hey, there's no more Fed. You guys print the money yourselves. Because they would do, they would be even worse. They would.

• 1:06:53David Hoffman?

  So Peter, if you, if you were president, what would your economic policy be? What would you want to see done?

• 1:06:59Speaker 00

  Well, I would want to undo things. I mean, that's, you know, I ran for Senate one time. I didn't win, obviously. But I said, look, I'm not going to do anything. I'm just going to undo everything. That's all I wanted to do. I didn't want to pass any new laws. I just wanted to repeal the laws that already existed. I guess every, every time I repeal the law, I would restore some freedom that the law took away. So I would just want to eliminate as much government as I possibly could. Get rid of as many agencies and departments that never should have been established in the first place, that have done much more harm than good, if they've done any good at all.

• 1:07:37Speaker 00

  But I would try to restore the Constitution and the original premise on which it was based, which was a very limited federal government where the powers are few and defined. I would want the government to live within the confines of the Constitution. And I would level with the American public about the entitlements and say, "Look, you know, we're going to get rid of Social Security, we're going to get rid of Medicare, Medicaid, all this stuff, right? You know, it's unconstitutional, it's been a disaster, you know. Social Security is a Ponzi scheme too, just run by the government, as opposed to the private sector." And that makes it even worse, because it means that people are forced to participate

• 1:08:20Speaker 00

  in a Ponzi scheme, which guarantees even more people end up losing. But I would try to figure out the best way to take care of people temporarily, who because of Social Security are in financial situations that, absent Social Security, they would not be in. I mean, if people weren't taxed their whole life by the government and told that Social Security is going to take care of you, they wouldn't take care of themselves. They would have saved for their own retirement. So we now have so many people that are dependent on government because the government created that dependency by creating a program. So I recognize that you just can't take Social Security away from everybody. So we have to have a way of means testing a new program, right? A welfare-type program where we either

• 1:09:05Speaker 00

  buy people an annuity or find some way to take care of the most needy. But people who are wealthy, and I don't want to base it on your income, because I don't want to discourage people from working, but if you have wealth, if you have property, if you have stock portfolio, then you don't get the Social Security. Just, you know, sell your stocks. You know, I'm not going to subsidize your children's inheritance, right? I'm not going to make poor people subsidize the inheritance of wealthy people. But we got to level with the public and get rid of these entitlements. Get the government out of banking, get the government out of education, get the government out of healthcare. Not because I don't value healthcare or education. I value them a lot. That's why I want the government to get the hell out of the way.

• 1:09:49Speaker 00

  I want the free market to be in charge of my healthcare, to be in charge of, you know, my kid's education. Just like, I don't want the government growing my food, right? We don't, we have private industry, we have farmers. You know, the government doesn't make my clothes. We don't have government clothing shops, right? I can't be naked, I need to be clothed, but I don't depend on the government for my clothes. Consumer electronics, you think, does the government make all the tech? No, that's why tech is such a good industry, because the government's not involved in it, right? The way they are in healthcare and education. They screwed those things up. So we gotta get the government out of all this stuff. I would also default on the national debt, because there's no way it could be paid, right?

• 1:10:33Speaker 00

  I would be honest and I would tell the creditors, "Look, you loaned us $35 trillion and we're broke. And there's no way we're gonna pay it back, because I would get rid, I would get rid of the Fed and replace it with nothing, in which case, interest rates would go way up." Let's say interest rates went up to 10%. Well, we can't pay 10% a year on $35 trillion. We'd destroy the country. So, and just like I ask people, "You're not gonna get your social security, you're not gonna get your government pension, right? Or you're gonna get a fraction of it." I would tell the creditors, "You're not gonna get 100 cents on a dollar. The American public doesn't have it, and you were dumb to lend it to us in the first place." So, look, you know, there's gonna be losses, and I'm not insensitive to the fact that people are gonna lose money,

• 1:11:18Speaker 00

  but if we stay on the current course, more people are gonna lose even more money. Not that they're gonna lose their money, their money is gonna lose the value, and that's what's worse, right? So I'd rather lose half my money than not lose any of my money, but my money loses 90% of its value. That's worse, right? So, I would do, make all the reforms that need to be made, and, you know, basically swallow the bitter tasting medicine that will heal the economy and put it in a space where it can legitimately grow in the future.

• 1:11:52Speaker 00

  Whether I could get any of that passed through Congress, I mean, what I would probably have to do if I was president, see, I would veto everything, right? So no budget would be passed, I would veto everything. And so the only way that they could avoid this government shutdown and avoid cutting spending would be to override my veto. So all I would need would be like one-third of the House or the Senate to stand with me, and then we could do all this good stuff, right? They'd have to have the guts to say, yep, we're not going to override Schiff's veto. And then they have to cut. They have to slash the budget because they can't keep... If I... I wouldn't sign the bill to raise the debt ceiling. That's it. That's the ceiling. It's not going up. So now we got to deal with the debt.

• 1:12:37Speaker 00

  That's why, you know, I always laugh every time they have these debt ceiling debates. And they say, "Look, you know, America always pays our bills. We need to raise the debt ceiling." No. If we paid our bills, we wouldn't have any debt. We have to raise the debt ceiling because we never pay our bills, and we want to keep not paying our bills. And so we have to raise the debt ceiling so we can keep on not paying. The only responsible thing to do is leave the ceiling where it is. In fact, that's another thing. When they initially allowed the Federal Reserve to buy government bonds, it was during World War I. And at the same time, that's when they imposed the first debt ceiling. Because they were worried that if they let the Fed buy government bonds, the government would sell too many bonds and there'd be too much debt. So they put in a debt ceiling.

• 1:13:20Speaker 00

  But they forgot that Congress could raise it. That was the problem. So they forgot about that one little fact. And it was like a ceiling in name only, right? But that's why we even have it.

• 1:13:33David Hoffman?

  Okay, let's get into the world of equities and the stock market. So is the stock market overpriced, underpriced, or fairly priced?

• 1:13:40Speaker 00

  Well, it's clearly overpriced. That doesn't mean it's going to go way down because they can print too much money and then it's going to go up in nominal terms. But in terms of gold... The stock market is going to come down a lot. There's no doubt in my mind that that's going to happen. If you take a look at gold as real money, and you look at what is the price of the stock market in real money? And what is that price going to be in the future? It's going to be a lot lower. Now, it could be with the stock market going up, just not as much as gold. As I've said, in the last 23 years, you know, that's when this century started, the Dow is up fourfold and gold is up eightfold.

• 1:14:22Speaker 00

  So in terms of gold, the Dow is down 50% in over 20 years. So that, you know, that's a decline. I think that's going to continue. And I think it's going to accelerate. So, you know, I think the market has a long way to go now. Tech stocks have even bigger to go. You know, not that I'm not optimistic on technology. I mean, I'm very optimistic on the future of technology. I mean, how could you not be? But the markets always get ahead of, you know, where things are. And a lot of optimism gets priced in. You have a lot of people that have piled into the MAG7, or not even seven anymore, how many are left that are still magnificent? But, you know, I mean, it's a crowded, crowded trade.

• 1:15:07Speaker 00

  And so, you know, we're going to get a washout. But, you know, the Fed is going to print a lot of money. So it's a moving target, you know, because it's like if I was going to measure my height, but I didn't know how big the ruler was going to be. You know, if you could keep shrinking the ruler, you know, I can be seven foot tall. That mean I can dunk the basketball because I'm still the same height. But the ruler is smaller. And so if you make money smaller, and now you measure your stock portfolio, it's going to look like it's a bigger portfolio. But, but it's not. You just changed the way you measure it. Gold is constant. Gold can't be changed by government. An ounce of gold is an ounce of gold. And so there, you know, it's legitimate.

• 1:15:50Speaker 00

  And you're going to see prices go down. And they're going to go down a lot. Because not only is the market way overpriced in terms of gold, but we have a serious economic crisis in our future.

• 1:16:04Speaker 00

  Because we got to pay the piper for all this debt and the serial bubble blowing. The economy is completely dysfunctional. Look at the most recent economic data. We have record low savings in this country. Record high consumer debt, credit card debt, corporate debt, government debt. You name it, record high debt. We have a massive collapse of the commercial real estate market. We have an insolvent banking system where they've lost money on every mortgage. They've written every commercial mortgage, every residential mortgage. It's a disaster. We just had the worst merchandise trade deficit in one month in history, with the exception of the first four months of 2022, which were an aberration because that's when we reopened the economy from the pandemic

• 1:16:47Speaker 00

  and we had a backlog of goods that came shipped in. But we have, our trade deficits are skyrocketing. Our budget deficits, you know, the national debt is almost 35.3 trillion. It's rising at a rate above 3 trillion a year. Interest is now the third largest line item on the federal budget. We're spending over a trillion a year just on interest on the debt. Within another year or two, interest expense will be higher than social security or Medicare. It'll be the number one thing that the government spends money on. You know, at some point, all of our tax revenue is going to go just to pay interest on the debt, which is an impossible point to get to. We're going to have to have a collapse before it gets that bad. I can't imagine our creditors being dumb enough to allow that,

• 1:17:32Speaker 00

  although again, I've overestimated the intelligence of investors in the past, right? Like I did with Bitcoin. And, you know, they've already been, gone along with this longer than they should have. But the move to de-dollarize has already started. You can see that, you know, the BRIC nations, these countries are, you know, not holding as many dollars, are trying to get out of dollars, they're buying gold. That's where the gold buying is coming from, is coming from central banks other than industry because retail investors haven't been buying. I mean, they've been selling gold. There were net redemptions coming out of gold ETFs all year. I'm not sure if that's stopped yet. But, you know, retail investors have been selling their gold, right? They don't.

• 1:18:15Speaker 00

  Have confidence in it. They have confidence in Nvidia. That's what they're buying. Or they're buying Bitcoin. They weren't buying any gold. And so, gold is cheap. Stocks are expensive. And we're gonna have a real financial crisis. I mean, the real crash is something that I wrote about in my 2013 book. And we haven't had it yet. You know, when I wrote my first book, Crash Proof, in 07, and then we got the financial crisis in 08, a lot of people thought that, "Ah, you were right. You wrote about an economic collapse, and we had it." And I had to write my other book to remind people that the crash that I predicted hadn't happened yet. That, yes, I did predict the collapse of the real estate market and the financial crisis,

• 1:18:58Speaker 00

  but that wasn't the economic crash. That was supposed to come next. That hasn't happened yet. And it still hasn't happened. But, all the ingredients are there. It's gonna happen. In fact, it's gonna happen worse than had it happened 10 years ago. Because all the problems that I pointed out back then are worse now. It's not like any of them got solved. They're all worse. And they got worse because we succeeded in postponing the pain. We kicked the can down the road, but that just allowed the problems to get bigger. So now we have even more debt. We have an even bigger bubble. So the economy is even more screwed up, with more misallocations of resources and malinvestments and stuff like that. And so, the market now has a bigger mess to fix.

• 1:19:44Speaker 00

  And so that means, you know, it's worse. So it's a more painful crisis. More people are gonna lose even more money. And I think, my strategy, I'll end up making even more money. Hopefully, I get to keep it. You know, I mean, I'm living here in Puerto Rico, so at least I'm exempt from income tax and the capital gains tax.

• 1:20:02Speaker 00

  But who knows? You know, I mean, I've got about as much tax certainty as I guess you could have, but it's never certain, because who knows?

• 1:20:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  So on that, so it sounds like you're doing okay, Peter. Let's talk about the average listener. What kind of principles for growing wealth do you live by? I mean, growing wealth is pretty important in order to achieve financial freedom, get out of that kind of the wage-slave status. How does someone grow their wealth? Like, what advice do you give to them?

• 1:20:31Speaker 00

  Well, the best way to grow your wealth is to start a successful business. You know, although, you know, when you start a business, you know, I, I comment, you know, we had Labor Day this last weekend, and everybody wants to celebrate, you know, the worker, right? And yeah, like, I've got nothing against people who do a hard day's work. I mean, that's great, right? Uh, but, you know, the unsung heroes are not the workers, but the people who employ them. You know, the, the entrepreneur is the real hero of capitalism. I mean, anybody can show up and collect a paycheck. Yeah, you know, you gotta do the work that you're assigned, and you gotta use the tools that you're provided. But what's harder is to figure out what everybody's gonna do, and provide them with the tools, and take the risks, right?

• 1:21:15Speaker 00

  Uh, and do it all on the come, right? When, when you get a job, you get a salary, right? When you, to, to do a job. And you collect that salary, whether the company makes a profit or not, you gotta get paid. The entrepreneur only gets paid if there's money left over. And if there's no money left over, he doesn't get paid. In fact, if there's a negative balance, he's gotta fund it. He's gotta come up with a loss. Or maybe he mortgages his house, or does, does something. But you can make a lot more money owning your own business than as an employee for somebody else. Because as long as you're an employee, you're an expense, right? And so businesses try to minimize their expenses. So there's only so much.

• 1:21:57Speaker 00

  Now, if you're like a commissioned salesman, you kinda can make more if you sell more. But generally, you know, you're working for a wage, and there's, you know, there's a cap, maybe you'll get a bonus. But if you really wanna make a lot of money, you start a business. And if you can make it successful, uh, then you can relax. You, you don't have to work as hard after you succeed. You have to work very hard. The hardest workers are the business owners. They work harder than anybody they work for. I remember when I started my business initially, I was the first person there in the morning, and the last person to leave at night, right? Nobody worked harder than me. And for the first couple of years, I didn't make any money. I was the only one not, you know, not making money. So that's, that's what, that's, and that's, you know, I'm no different than, that's, there's stories like this everywhere.

• 1:22:41Speaker 00

  So that's the best way to get, make, get a lot of money, is to start a big business and, and grow it. Because then your business can earn money and you don't have to work as hard, right? I don't work as hard, you know, as I did when I started. I take more time off now than I did then. And I, you know, I make more money now than I did then. And it's also important, you know, to try to find a business that you like, right? Don't, don't try to get into a business that doesn't excite you, that doesn't interest you. Because you're gonna have to devote so much time to it that you, you better enjoy it, right? You better have like some passion for what you're doing. And, and if you do feel good about what you're doing,

• 1:23:26Speaker 00

  it'll be easier to devote the type of time to it that you need. You don't want to be, you know, doing something that you, that you hate. So, you know, hopefully you can find something you like, that you're good at, that you can devote time to. And, and then, and then, you know, pursue it. And, you know, work, work your butt off and, you know, overcome the obstacles that are in your path. Because there'll be many of them. And learn from your mistakes because you're gonna make a bunch of them, right? But, and then, you know, to the extent that you're investing, invest wisely, you know? And don't, don't jump on a, on a, on a, on a bandwagon, you know? Be a contrarian and, and be patient and you'll make money. You know, that's the, the Warren Buffett strategy, which is interesting because, you know,

• 1:24:11Speaker 00

  Warren Buffett has been a big seller of stocks as of late. He should be buying gold instead of hoarding cash.

• 1:24:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  He'll never do that. He'll never buy gold.

• 1:24:22Speaker 00

  No, no, well, Warren Buffett criticizes gold as an investment. And I agree, it's not an investment, it's money. And, and I think that if you asked Warren Buffett, if you're gonna put, you know, you know, a million dollars into a safety deposit box and come back in five or 10 years, would you want to put dollar bills or gold bars? He would, he would put gold bars in there. So he realizes that gold is a better store of value. But, you know, he would rather invest in a business that's growing and, and earning money and paying dividends than just own a medal. And under normal circumstances, of course, that's always going to be the case. But right now, I think that those businesses that are publicly traded are just very expensive,

• 1:25:07Speaker 00

  which is why Buffett has been selling them, not buying them. And I think gold is very inexpensive. And so if Buffett thinks stocks are too expensive to buy, he should sell them, but not hold dollars. He should hold gold instead. Because if he's waiting for bargains, the bargains are going to be much bigger if you can buy stuff with gold as opposed to dollars.

• 1:25:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, Peter, this has been great. Glad to have you on. As we close this out, maybe I'm going to ask the most challenging question of the podcast. So you spent a lot of time today basically talking about Bitcoin being sort of a malinvestment, just like not a good idea, pyramid scheme, all of these things. I want you to do the opposite as we close. This is why I said it was challenging because I know you don't think this. But can you steel man the case for Bitcoin and crypto for listeners today? What is the most compelling piece of the story that you've heard? And if you were asked to steel man it, give the best possible case, what would you say?

• 1:26:06Speaker 00

  Well, the only compelling argument to it is that it is possible that there's another wave of buying. You know, you have the ETFs that are out there. You know, they're trying to pressure Trump to the extent that he becomes president. And I hope he does because he's better than the alternative. You know, will Trump, you know, will they be able to succeed in getting the US government to buy Bitcoin? I mean, I hope they don't buy Bitcoin. You know, it's the last thing we need to do is print more money to buy Bitcoin. But to the extent that some of these things happen, and I know there's going to be very high inflation. I know we're going to have a dollar crisis.

• 1:26:49Speaker 00

  People are going to be looking for alternatives to the dollar, to the euro, to the yen. And it's possible that people might take refuge in Bitcoin. And Given the fact that there's 21 million of them, or 2.1 quadrillion satoshis, but you know, we don't need to get into that, but whatever, 21 million bitcoin.

• 1:27:16Speaker 00

  If enough people who own bitcoin don't sell, and you get enough money coming in, yeah, the price could move up. As I said, it could move up to 100,000, 200,000, 300,000, it could happen. And you could sell it at those prices. Now, most people won't, right? If, I mean, if bitcoin does go to a couple hundred thousand, most of you hodlers will, oh, wow, yeah, diamond hands, I'm not selling, right? I'm taking it to the grave. And so, most of you will just ride it up and ride it down. But there may be the opportunity. But again, I think there's as much, if not more upside in other speculative assets that have real fundamental value,

• 1:27:58Speaker 00

  that I think have a much lower chance of crashing than bitcoin. So even though I concede that it's possible that the circumstances that are gonna unfold with inflation and the dollar and all this stuff could result in another wave into bitcoin, I just don't think it's worth betting on it. And it's also, you gotta ask yourself, why hasn't it already happened? Like, what's stopping it? Why isn't bitcoin? I mean, when the bitcoin ETFs were launched in January, you go back and you look at what everybody was saying about where bitcoin would be by now, you know, way higher. I mean, bitcoin is still up this year, but only for the first two months.

• 1:28:43Speaker 00

  All the gains that bitcoin has had in 2024 were in January and February. Since the end of February, it's gone down, maybe about 10%, maybe close to that. Well, gold's gone up 22%, 23%. So... You gotta ask, so why is this happening? I mean, does this, does this mean something, right? Despite all this buying? And what I'm concerned about too, is what happens when the Bitcoin, when the ETF buyers become sellers? Because they haven't been. They've been, they've been buying, they've been riding it out, they've been buying the dips. But they've only been doing this for eight months, right? They're not, you know, true believers. They waited until 2024 to buy their first Bitcoin, a lot of them.

• 1:29:27Speaker 00

  And they didn't even buy it the right way. They bought it through an ETF. Uh, so they're, they're, they're purely speculating on the price, right? When you buy a Bitcoin ETF, all you're doing is buying it because you think the price is gonna go up. There's no other reason. It's not like you can do anything else with it because it's inside an ETF in your brokerage account. Uh, so you can't give it to somebody else, right? It's stuck. All you can do is sell it. You can't transfer it, you can't sneak it out of the country. It's not self custody. They're not your keys. So it's just people that are buying as a, as a, as a gamble. Just like they would buy a biotech stock or, you know, anything. And at some point, they're gonna be disappointed. They, they were promised a big gain on their Bitcoin.

• 1:30:11Speaker 00

  And so far, most people in the Bitcoin ETFs are losing money. And at some point, they're gonna lose enough money that they're going to call it quits, right? They're gonna sell. And I just don't think that's possible. I just don't think there's enough real buying in the spot market to allow that to happen. I mean, there was plenty of sellers in the spot market that sold their Bitcoin to these ETF buyers. That's why the ETFs have all this Bitcoin, because people sold it, right? To them. But I don't think those same people are gonna wanna buy it back. And I think they're happy they got rid of it. The last thing they do is want, want that hot potato back. And so all of a sudden, there's gonna be all this selling and the market's gonna implode.

• 1:30:54Speaker 00

  It's gonna be the biggest Bitcoin crash we've, we've ever seen. And, you know, in prior Bitcoin crashes...

• 1:31:01Speaker 00

  What has saved the day was Tether. Right? You know, all of a sudden, a bunch of Tethers come in. They create a bunch of Tethers and they buy Bitcoin. Right? That kind of like stops the decline. Well, that won't work if the selling is coming from an ETF. Because the ETFs can't take Tether. They need dollars because they have to put the dollars in their customers brokerage accounts. They can't say, "Well, we didn't get any dollars. We're going to give you some Tether." They have to give them the actual cash in their accounts that day. Right? It's market, right? If I own a Bitcoin ETF and I just, I put the sell, I hit sell. The ETF has to sell those Bitcoin that day. They have to put cash in my account that day.

• 1:31:46Speaker 00

  And so if there's no bids, well, they just got to hit whatever bids are there. They can't say, "Well, we didn't sell because there really wasn't anybody there." Well, the price has to keep coming down until there is somebody there. Right? Because they just hit sell. Because it's not like when Grayscale was a closed-end trust. Didn't matter, right? If people dumped Grayscale, it just, it went down. It didn't affect Bitcoin. That's why Grayscale, as a closed-end trust, got to a 50% discount. Because people wanted out and so it traded at a discount. But none of those Bitcoin ever got sold. They were just trapped in Grayscale. But now that everybody owns the ETFs, every time they sell,

• 1:32:28Speaker 00

  those Bitcoin now go back to the actual market and they have to find an actual buyer. Well, when all the people who own the ETFs are selling, who's going to be buying? You know, so it's just going to be just like a trap door. And it's just going to be a crash. And then, you know, people have borrowed money to buy Bitcoin, margin calls. I mean, it's just, you know, it's going to be a bloodbath, right? And that's coming. And, you know, and I'm sure, you know, wherever Bitcoin bottoms out, you know, it'll probably rise, you know? It's not, you know, going to just go straight down. I mean, there'll be rallies, I mean, dead cats bounce, right? So Bitcoin can drop to 10,000 or 5,000 on ETF liquidation. And it can

• 1:33:10Speaker 00

  Then it can bounce to 15,000 or 20,000, you know, after everybody gets flushed out. But then it'll go down again. So I, you know, it's just, it's just not for me, you know, um, I, I don't, I don't, you know, I don't, I don't want to play in that. In that casino, there's, there's other risk reward situations that are a lot better. Do I wish I had taken a position when I first heard about it? Of course, you know, and people, you know, try to make it out like, ah, you see Peter regrets not buying Bitcoin. Well, yeah, I mean, I'm not an idiot. I mean, everybody who bought Bitcoin regrets not buying more. Right? I mean, everybody's like, should I should have bought more of it when I first heard about it? Right? Everybody, because with the benefit of hindsight. Yeah, there are a lot of things I should have loaded up on Nvidia 10 years ago, whatever, you know.

• 1:33:55Speaker 00

  I, you know, I remember when I didn't like it because it was, I thought, well, you know, it's, it's all this, they're making all this stuff for the crypto miners, right? That, that, that's a fad. But, uh, but, you know, there are, there are a lot of stocks that I could have bought. That I didn't buy, and with the benefit of hindsight, I wish I bought them, you know? But there are a lot of stocks that I did buy that did really well. And I think there are some that I own that will do really well. And of course, I don't have benefit of hindsight with these. I'm, I'm, I'm trying to figure it out with, with foresight. But, you know, I, I, people who, who buying into these things now, you're not, you know, people think. I, oh, I'm getting in on the ground floor buying Bitcoin. You're not getting it on the ground floor. I mean, you're not even close to the ground floor.

• 1:34:37Speaker 00

  Right? When, when so many people know about it and talk about it and hype it up. I mean, there was just this Bitcoin convention. In fact, I ran into the guy at a party here a couple of weeks ago in Puerto Rico. Uh, who threw that convention Bitcoin magazine guy, CEO. And, you know, he had over 20,000 people at his convention. And I was like, you know, I go to these gold conventions every year. The, the one I go to, the oldest, the biggest retail gold convention in the U.S. Is in New Orleans every year and you know they get like 500 people. That's like the big granddaddy of the gold conferences. 500 people, guy's got 20,000 people at his conference. And he's got presidential candidates talking there. I mean, all these big, I mean, they're not coming to the gold conferences.

• 1:35:21Speaker 00

  So when you see something like that, you know, that's like, you know, during the housing bubble. You know, I, if you haven't seen my mortgage banker's speech from 2006. You know, I, I went to this conference of mortgage bankers in 05 and 06, you know, at the peak of the housing bubble. And they had a big extravagant conference with, you know, all kinds of frills. They had like, you know, tigers there and you know, all kinds of like crazy things. And I remember pointing out like, look, this is obviously the top of this mortgage bubble, housing bubble, that you guys can afford this elaborate conference. I mean, this doesn't happen at, at, at market bottoms. This happens at market tops where you have this kind of excitement and money just thrown around.

• 1:36:03Speaker 00

  And you know, that's what you had at this Nashville Bitcoin conference. So it's, you know, when you're on the top, you got no place to go but down, you know? So that's, I think that's, that's, that's, that's where it's headed.

• 1:36:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, Peter, I'm not sure how many people you convinced in the bankless nation, but you certainly made the case. We appreciate it. I only, my only wish-

• 1:36:23Speaker 00

  Hopefully we convinced some, you know, at least, you know what? At least hedge your bets.

• 1:36:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 1:36:28Speaker 00

  Hey, acknowledge that I could be right, right? I mean, maybe I'm not crazy old man. I could be right. Take something off the top, you know, sell some Bitcoin. Don't let it all ride, right? Like, you know, you know, don't leave it all on black and keep spinning the wheel. Take some of the chips off the table, put them in your pocket, right? Play with the house's money, right? You know, whatever. And then take that money, buy real investments, buy gold, buy silver, buy stocks, pay dividends. Maybe buy yourself some income producing real estate. Do something. And even if I'm wrong and Bitcoin goes to a million or whatever Michael Saylor says 30 million. I don't know what a crazy number he pulled out of his butt.

• 1:37:10Speaker 00

  But you'll still be rich. Even if you have half as many Bitcoin, you'll still have twice as many, actually not twice as many, infinitely more than I do, right? So you'll, you'll still have plenty of Bitcoin if you sell half your Bitcoin now or whatever you're gonna do. But if I'm right and you haven't sold anything, you're broke. Right, so you don't want to be broke. You don't want to have to start from zero because you've lost everything and missed out on some of these opportunities. I mean, I could be right. Some of the, you know, what if gold stocks do go up 10 times, 20 times, 50 times, and Bitcoin collapses? You've missed, not only have you lost all this money in Bitcoin, but you've missed out on the opportunity to make that money. So, you know, put a little money there too.

• 1:37:54Speaker 00

  Like, cover your bets, right? I'm so confident that Bitcoin's not going to go anywhere that I don't even bother to gamble on it. But if you own it, you have to perceive that there's a good chance that you're right, even though you might, I mean, that you're wrong. Even, you might be right, but there's a decent chance that you're wrong. So, invest based on that chance that you're wrong. And in fact, at Schiff Gold, I know we make it easy because we work with this company called Bitpay. We're probably one of the first companies to start working with Bitpay. But you can go on Schiff Gold and using Bitpay, you can actually buy your gold directly with your Bitcoin in the same transaction. So you can get rid of fool's gold and buy the real thing.

• 1:38:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow, well, Peter Schiff trying to vampire attack us right now on Bankless.

• 1:38:39Speaker 00

  No, I'm trying to help you guys out.

• 1:38:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you for the help.

• 1:38:42Speaker 00

  I'm doing my good deed.

• 1:38:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  You certainly made the case. I think we're going to have to check back in a thousand years and see, see what the monetary note of account is.

• 1:38:50Speaker 00

  Check back next year. Check back next year.

• 1:38:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, all right. We'll definitely check back with you. Peter, thank you so much for coming on Bankless today.

• 1:38:56Speaker 00

  My pleasure.

• 1:38:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Got to end with this, of course. None of this has been financial advice. You know, crypto is risky. So is gold, or maybe not. According to Peter, you could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.