Bitcoin Forum

Peter Schiff Says Owning Bitcoin (BTC) Was 'Bad Idea' After Losing

After an eight percent dump, it seemed like things couldn't get better for Bitcoin bears in the likes of Euro Pacific Capital CEO Peter Schiff. However, instead of gloating over the humiliating defeat of the bulls, the gold bug took to Twitter to express his frustration over losing access to his BTC holdings.

Source: u.today (https://u.today/peter-schiff-says-owning-bitcoin-btc-was-bad-idea-after-losing-access-to-his-wallet)

---

I just can't help but laugh after reading this. While making any digital accounts/wallet, after all its your responsible as the owner to save and take care of your digital belongings, at least make a backup and secure your device.

So he eventually decided to buy Bitcoin after all that complaining that Bitcoin is so much worse than gold. That's interesting :)

Also, saying that he lost his password doesn't really put the blame on Bitcoin. He lost it because he did not follow the guidelines. You are always supposed to have a backup of your wallet. Also, it's a good idea to have seed words so that you can recover your wallet even when both copies get damaged, for instance in a house fire. Peter looked to me like a smart guy and he didn't even make a wallet backup.

Also, that BTC dump did not look organic. More like a single whale dumping his stash, maybe hoping to screw with some overleveraged traders. It's not going to mark a return to the bear market, it was too quick and too steep.

Typical boating "accident" for which Gold bugs are famous.  I guess it scales to Bitcoin as well :)

Aye. It's a great way to keep dissing Bitcoin and simultaneously cover them track. Since his father was a fanatical tax dodger it fits the mould rather nicely. Is there actually a wallet these days that lets you open it without recording and inputting your seed? I haven't come across one for a long time.

Edit - it's all Erik Vorhees's fault - https://twitter.com/ErikVoorhees/status/1219046141028982784

And it's... 50 bucks worth?

This old man is just making everything a reason to hit at Bitcoin. Bitcoin does not come with a robot or a slave to do everything for him. He needs to use a little of his mind and effort to make sure everything is put in the right place.

He is a bitcoin hater. However, maybe the bitcoin maximalists should teach him instead of reacting negatively to his tweets hehehe.

Also, this should be accepted by bitcoiners that solutions should be created to produce better wallets to make it easier for newbies.

I am sure that Bitcoin holders and supporters are laughing at Peter Schiff and his predicament right now. So eventually he bought some Bitcoin maybe just to show us that owning one can be more difficult than owning gold, and maybe in that aspect he can be right. However, a gold owner can also lost gold if he can be careless just like what this man had done with his password. And in this world there is no guaranteed cure for a carelessness (or being stupid for that matter) especially with the stature like that of Mr. Schiff. Personally, I have nothing against Peter Schiff as I also welcome and appreciate investments in the real gold but there is no need to be destroying each other as we can all be good friends and be supportive of each other. We can b supporting gold while also supporting Bitcoin, right? Gold and Bitcoin can be considered as the best investment assets, safe havens and store of value.

I don’t know why everyone focuses with any statement issued by Peter Schiff, Craig 'Faketoshi' Wright, Roger Ver or others. These people want to be the people’s talk and thus they show extremist views.

Peter Schiff is a Bitcoin hater, but I do not know why he focuses on it & spends a lot of time tracking prices or even buying some coins "if we assume that he lost them."

The story is funny and does not deserve to be discussed.

"If you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you, sorry" - Satoshi Nakamoto

PS: He needs Bitcoin in his bank accounts - job done

Agreed. It shouldn't be the case that stupidity from the user's end should result in loss of funds so easily.

I do however have to point out that the banks we always assumed our money was safe with in case our bank account gets emptied by hackers, are no longer always refunding the total balance. I'm reading more and more stories where people are literally left broke because the bank refuses to refund people because it's their own mistake that they lost their money.

In the end, Peter Schiff is always looking for a reason to trash talk Bitcoin. If it isn't the price of Bitcoin that has greatly outperformed Gold this year, it's something else he will use. It's not a surprise that after no more price tweets he now resort to such silly methods to gather attention. Shiny rock at $5000 per ounce yet?  :D

Fortunately for us in the crypto industry, his opinion does not matter which is something good for us to run with. Over the years, a lot of people have expressed opinion on bitcoin and crypto but eventually nothing happened to it which makes the joke to be on him. I am sure if the price even drop, he will still have something to talk about.

Why comment on an article you have not read?

Peter Schiff did not buy BTC, but received it as a gift (https://twitter.com/PeterSchiff/status/1146939097111511041) (linked in the article). The fact that he lost something now (password or something else) is just proof that he has no idea what BTC really is and what it means to be your own bank.

I don't even understand the need to convince people like Schiff or Buffett/Munger that something is good or bad, they are a species in extinction that works by the old rules and so will be until the very end.

I haven't come across a wallet in recent times that hasn't forced me to record and reenter the seed. It has also made it very, very clear what happens if I lose the seed.

Can't really think of much more they can do. If you don't pay attention then balls to you.

There are actually many wallets that let you skip that step at your own risk. I've skipped the step many times on different apps and then had the constant fear whether I've written down my seeds or not. Up to this day, I'm still not sure whether I have the seeds for all of my wallets written down. It's scary.. The writing down part should be mandatory..

However, this case is different and has no link to a Bitcoin flaw or anything else except his own mistake. Peter doesn't know how Bitcoin works (https://twitter.com/PeterSchiff/status/1218919039373701123). Peter's wallet was set up by Erik Voorhees (https://twitter.com/ErikVoorhees/status/1014014085212573696) but he did not save his phrase (https://twitter.com/ErikVoorhees/status/1219046141028982784). The worst thing he could've done was blaming Bitcoin for his mistake. This just shows how much he really knows about Bitcoin at all.

Let's not also mention the fact that he was holding his funds on Blockchain Wallet, and there have been plenty of stories from people who've had the same issue as him. Although they state they "don't have access to your wallet or your wallet password" (https://support.blockchain.com/hc/en-us/articles/211205343-I-forgot-my-password-What-can-you-do-to-help-), holding funds on a server-sided wallet is a risk one has to assume. But because Peter hasn't used Bitcoin, his statements hold no value in my eyes.

And Mr. Binance has some wonderful advice for all of us -

'Many hardcore crypto ogs advocate storing your own keys. But the truth is, today most people are not able to secure a key even from themselves (losing it). A trusted centralized exchange is #SAFUer for most people. The numbers speak for themselves.'

https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1218973539207770113

All this from the man whose site has been hacked AND wanted to roll back the blockchain to counter it.

If you can't secure a wallet then having your funds in a place that can be emptied with a password or two, that's if they don't empty it themselves, is not turning me on.

If we had a way to send him a couple BTC's then he might not hate so much.  :D

Agreed, however. Everyone should be helpful to the newbies who sincerely want to learn and ignore the people who say anything bad about bitcoin to try to trick us to get our attention.

"I just lost all the #Bitcoin I have ever owned. My wallet got corrupted somehow and my password is no longer valid. So now not only is my Bitcoin intrinsically worthless; it has no market value either. I knew owning Bitcoin was a bad idea, I just never realized it was this bad!"

I have serious doubt about the claims that he is making that his wallet is corrupted.  ::) We know Peter Schiff hates Bitcoin, so why would he buy bitcoins in the first place? Also, if you hate something, you will do some research and talk to a lot of people to find ways to criticize it.

The way he is talking, seem to indicate that he might have fabricated the "wallet corruption" claim and it is evident that he knows very little about wallet recovery.

You should think that an experienced stock broker / financial commentator would do some basic research on a topic before he spews nonsense like this, but it is clear what his agenda was with this "wallet corruption" post.  ::)

It's honestly beyond stupid. It just shows how incompetent he is, treating his investments with such negligence.

Perhaps it's a publicity stunt as well to keep up with his stance that BTC is a worthless investment.

Schiff has shown that he is a long term irrational decision maker, telling people to invest in gold at any time without taking into account any measure of market conditions. Gold bugs like these have historically not outperformed investors in the equities sector over the long run.

More likely a publicity stunt than just pure negligence. It was intentional most probably.

I cannot imagine Peter actually buying Bitcoin as an investment in the first place. That would make him more stupid as ever. That would make his words and actions on the opposite poles. At this point in time and with all the words he had said against Bitcoin, it is foolish to simply turn around. Everything he is will turn into shreds if he does that.

In a sense, he's not wrong.  It's all well and good saying he's just a Bitcoin hater and dismissing him, but it's important we get our response to this correct.  People (the ones on the outside looking in, who might be persuaded by Schiff) need to understand what happened and why.  So far in this topic, I don't think we've placed enough emphasis on that, so here goes:  

If you're a complete fool who isn't even prepared to try and understand the first thing about Bitcoin (but somehow still think you're qualified to give an opinion on it), it is a bad idea to dive straight in without knowing what you're doing.  People generally aren't accustomed to being responsible for digital keys.  It's a new skill set for the average person to learn.  And if they don't learn it, they can quite easily lose their funds.

Owning some bitcoin is a good idea if you have taken the time to understand how to use it safely.  If you are too ignorant or lazy to do that, then Bitcoin is not suitable for you.  Personal responsibility is a fundamental requirement here.  Chances are, no one is going to bail you out if you screw it up.

How many of you would go out and buy a firearm if you didn't even know how to use one?  That would be a bad idea too.  People don't tend to buy a car until they know how to drive one.  It's basic common sense and Peter Schiff clearly has none of that.  Even if it was a gift, the person who gave it to him should absolutely take it as a sign of ingratitude that he didn't take the time to learn how to use it.  

How many times should it be written that this is not an investment but a gift. Accordingly, we can apply the saying "Easy come, easy go". Much more stupid than himself are the ones who donated him BTC, and apparently they did not bother to explain to him that BTC was not the same as gold.

It's amazing the fascination of people who are involved with crypto with people like Schiff, as if everyone's future depends on him. He should be allowed to play with gold, he knows it and is successful in it.

I laughed for a long time when I read about it. Why does he blame everyone around him for his mistake?

He's just trying to stay relevant I noticed Blockchain.com sent him a message offering to help him recover his funds.
Funny they don't do this for other's who lose coins there.

Why is he even complaining? He only received $1k in BTC and all those money were gifts!
Am I the only one seeing this as Shiff's total failure on many levels?
-He got it for free (should be grateful instead of complaining)
-He did not know how to protect it (not very smart)
-He forgot his password (what a loser)
-He told the public about forgetting his password (nobody cares)
-He's trying to blame a computer program for his own inability to operate it (childish)
-It's a very small loss compared to how much money he has and he makes a big deal out of it. (again immature)
-Uses it for his own agenda (bitcoin is bad, buy gold)

Agreed.  It would be like if my grandfather gave their 13 year old grandchild a 1/10 ounce of gold and then the kid went outside and it fell out of her pocket in a lake.  Then they said, "I didn't lose it, my pocket it."

Blame the gold or blame the person who didn't take care of it?  It is like blaming forks for making people fat and guns for shootings.

Ah, yep. Mr. Schiff is back again with some derogatory news on BTC. Glad to know the world is still running ::)

It's obvious that this was nothing but his own fault. If he's not willing to invest some of his millions of dollars from shilling gold to his clients with little to no returns into a hardware wallet that can secure your holdings 99.999% of the time, then why did he invest in BTC in the first place? I've even used Electrum for a few years before I got a hardware wallet, and even then I've never had issues with losing coins.

Does he not know the importance of backup? I wonder when his supporters will finally start waking up to realize how incompetent this man is :-\

i follow this twitter   :D
whats make me laugh is this twitter
I did not forget my password.  Read my tweet.  My wallet forgot my password.
https://twitter.com/PeterSchiff/status/1218919039373701123

i never hear about machine forget our password  ;D

It's actually worse than that, with cars and guns everyone understands how dangerous those things are, as everyone heard some stories about deaths caused by them, but it's not immediately obvious that Bitcoin is dangerous too. Yes, wallets warn users about the loss of private keys, but people usually don't pay much attention to such warnings. People who introduce others to Bitcoin should bring closer attention to this issue, but they often don't do it, because they themselves are newbies, so we have a closed circle - careless newbies create new careless newbies, and if someone spends little time in Bitcoin community, despite owning Bitcoin, chances are they are sitting on a time bomb of losing their keys.

Aren't we already doing that? I mean, there is no shortage of help here or on other social media platforms that people can seek.

The only problem I see is that newbies aren't really able to seperate people genuinely trying to help them from scammers trying to steal their coins. In most cases, as long as you use common sense you should be able to dodge most scammers, but newbies desperately trying to recoup their coins might still fall for it. :-\

I once helped a friend with his wallet configuration/setup, and he legit sent me a screenshot of his recovery seed. I told him to remove the wallet and re-install it and generate a brand new seed he shouldn't show to anyone. A scammer would have just kept his mouth shut and waited for an opportunity to steal coins.

Indeed.  Short of putting more warning messages in the wallet software, it's difficult to know what more we can do to make sure the message gets through.

---

I think the problem is that newbies don't necessarily seek help until they have a problem, which, by then, could be too late.  So we need to ensure, wherever possible, that newbies are aware of the importance of backups so they can recover their coins in the event something goes wrong.  For all his pomp and arrogance, Peter Schiff was a newbie.  So evidently, either:

a) no one stressed the importance of backups to him
or
b) someone did tell him, but he was too much of an asshat to listen.


It honestly wouldn't surprise me if it was b), but I'm prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt.

I'm with DooMAD here. He's not wrong, in a sense. I used to think it was really strange that the suits I knew who invested in Bitcoin actually didn't own btc. They paid for an amount of Bitcoin, sure, through an app or some other platform that gave them an account with a balance that updated with bitcoin price. Not even an actual wallet, never mind ownership of the private key. I explained this to them. They got it. But they didn't want that. They can't even trust themselves to remember their email password or phone SIM password, why would they want to risk that with money? So leaving it in the hands of a custodial service that protects their money for them, and reminds them of their password if they forget it, makes sense.

To put this in an actual real life example of my own, I gifted two children a small amount of bitcoin some time in 2018. Just recently, curious to see what they'd done (and to show them actually it's worth more than double now), I checked back. Guess what? The older kid, already 16, lost his private keys (printed). So, my lesson was, Bitcoin -- or at least, in the true sense it was meant to be -- isn't for everyone. Or, people aren't ready for it yet and need to be before they use it in the sense it was meant for.

It was, arguably, irresponsible of me to give it to a child and explain he was fully responsible for it without demonstrating the consequence. Perhaps it was the same for Schiff.

I would also add this is true for anything digital.  If you don't back up your Office files, eventually you'll lose something. If you don't back up your photos, you'll lose them. In short, if you don't back up electronics eventually something will go wrong.

If he had either backed up his device that had his wallet or backed up his password, he'd have been fine.

Bitcoin is not to blame for user error.  At best the device should automatically back your.

it's remaind me when my friends forget his litecoin private key, he mining litecoin in 2014, then giving his computer + hardisk to someone, when he remember his litecoin, the hardisk has been seling to other people, it's a pity .

now I know when you choose to use full controll wallet ( can acces private key ), you must save it carefully, but when you save your bitcoin in exchange or something like thats, you must ready too the service can be like MtGox.

Bitcoin is unregulated asset, also a decentralized asset even though government regulate it, govermant can't recover your  funds lost due scam exchange, scam investment etc.

peters problem is not a bitcoin problem. its a custodial service problem

i think if someone bought some of peters digital gold. but lost their email access or verification. they too would not have a easy way to get their gold back.

though custodial services are made to make things easier. they are not good at communicating the important parts.
many banks reqire people to submit ID and email and home address. not just for KYC regulations. but as a backup proof of ownership should someone forget their password.
yet some online FIAT services just ask for username password and email.
and yes people have actually lost money in paypal by losing access to their email and then forgetting their password.

as for crypto custodial services, they need to make saving seeds as a critical function of application/signup. with occassional reminders. and not just be a 'username''password''pin' system

i would much prefer custodial services to use KYC for the personal safety and service of its customers, rather than just a regulatory overwatch policing against its customers.

i think the best way to achieve such tasks is to simplify and buzzzword the things like 'keys/seeds' into something much more common.
EG: seed/key=crypto social security number or crypto birth certificate. to emphasise the importance to hold onto it for life and not hand it out freely

Sure there are legal ways of seizing Bitcoins. We ve been watching such after big crime like Silk Road happened. Why would you guess some of the whales wanted to skew Bitcoin more 'private' ? Surely not for good old Peter or average Joes...

That's what hardware wallets are for. It's a noob friendly way of using crypto without worrying about too many attack factors. It still requires you to hide your recovery seed, but that shouldn't be too much of a problem.

The only problem I have heard of from people I know using a Ledger was that it took a looooong time to update because of how slow Ledger's servers were at that point, but that's a minor annoyance in my opinion.

It might also have been related to how active the market was and for that reason more people were updating/setting up new devices, so it might very well be that Ledger has upgraded its servers to meet the increased demand.

things that happen in the crypto world become things worthy of some Hollywood comedy movie.

- When the price increases a lot we have all the news channels talking about very exaggerated forecasts

- When the price is stagnant in the same place we have all news channels saying that the price will fall a lot

- When the price drops a lot, the news channels post news as if it were the end of the world

and the most ridiculous ever:

- When a character of the financial world loses access to their coins, regret on social networks