Peter Schiff ‘Concedes’ Bitcoin Profitable, But Won’t Succeed as Money
Bitcoin (BTC) skeptic Peter Schiff has admitted that holding the cryptocurrency is profitable — but claims it will “never” compete with fiat currency.
In a tweet on Feb. 18, Schiff, well known as a fierce Bitcoin critic and longtime gold bug, “conceded” that the cryptocurrency in the past ten years had been a successful investment.
Schiff: BTC investors “make a lot of money”
“I concede that anyone who bought #Bitcoin 10 years ago and sells it today will make a lot of money,” he wrote.
“But I never said the price of Bitcoin could not rise. I only said that Bitcoin would never succeed as money. Nothing that has happened over the past 10 years has proven me wrong!”
Having recovered the wallet password that he assumed he had lost, Schiff is now once again the owner of around 0.4 BTC, the result of a donation campaign that sought to endear him to its benefits last year.
While the anti-Bitcoin rhetoric has since continued, Schiff appeared noticeably angered during the time that he thought his holdings were lost forever.
His latest complaint, as before, meanwhile received little sympathy among Twitter users. Bitcoin-friendly travel agent, TravelbyBit, was among the responses.
“#Bitcoin has succeeded as money,” the company wrote.
Schiff additionally said that RT host Max Keiser had refused to debate with him on this weekend’s episode of news review show Infowars. As Cointelegraph reported, Keiser used the opportunity to “officially” change his Bitcoin price outlook from $100,000 to $400,000.
Beating gold at its own game
As Saifedean Ammous noted in his popular book, “The Bitcoin Standard,” in terms of technical characteristics, Bitcoin does not only possess the three fundamental attributes required of money but does so considerably more effectively than fiat.
Its fixed supply, impossible to manipulate, gives rise to the description of Bitcoin as “digital gold,” something Schiff has long failed to refute.
The idea that Bitcoin could soon usurp the market cap of the world’s entire physical gold reserves remains a hot topic of debate.