Peter Schiff on Bitcoin

[Seth Otterstad]

I finally convinced an Austrian friend to dump some of his silver and buy bitcoin with it.  He found out that EuroPacific capital charges 3% to cash out of his silver position.  Yes, that's right.  Peter Schiff's company charges THREE PERCENT to get out of a position.  Of course he is never going to promote bitcoin when he can rape people that hard by plugging metals.

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[nobbynobbynoob]

I finally convinced an Austrian friend to dump some of his silver and buy bitcoin with it.  He found out that EuroPacific capital charges 3% to cash out of his silver position.  Yes, that's right.  Peter Schiff's company charges THREE PERCENT to get out of a position.  Of course he is never going to promote bitcoin when he can rape people that hard by plugging metals.

Buying bitcoin is probably a good investment. But I'd be dumping fiat long before dumping PMs.

IMO buying PMs should be for the long term, one should own physical gold or silver in the hand, and do so because one wants the gold or silver. For short-term speculation there are better tools to play with.

[foggyb]

I finally convinced an Austrian friend to dump some of his silver and buy bitcoin with it.  He found out that EuroPacific capital charges 3% to cash out of his silver position.  Yes, that's right.  Peter Schiff's company charges THREE PERCENT to get out of a position.  Of course he is never going to promote bitcoin when he can rape people that hard by plugging metals.

Why dump silver now, its only going up. It has to. Bad advice, especially with that 3% haircut. I'd try my best to find other assets to unload.

[foggyb]

peter schiff is an idiot who has been pumping precious metals and is heavily invested in them. I knew about him before bitcoin and I would have told you the exact same thing, because it's obvious. end of discussion.

Worthless troll is worthless.

His mortgage bankers speech will forever be one of my favorite financial speeches.

Agreed. I respect what Peter Schiff says about precious metals and bitcoin. If you don't understand bitcoin, DO NOT buy it as an investment.

[Seth Otterstad]

I finally convinced an Austrian friend to dump some of his silver and buy bitcoin with it.  He found out that EuroPacific capital charges 3% to cash out of his silver position.  Yes, that's right.  Peter Schiff's company charges THREE PERCENT to get out of a position.  Of course he is never going to promote bitcoin when he can rape people that hard by plugging metals.

Why dump silver now, its only going up. It has to. Bad advice, especially with that 3% haircut. I'd try my best to find other assets to unload.

Well if foggyb says there is 100% chance silver is going to go up now, how can anyone think differently?

The 3% fee is a sunk cost.  The 3% will have to be paid at some point, so it doesn't matter if it is paid now, and does not affect a buying or selling decision.  He could have dumped the silver, lost the 3%, bought 1000oz silver bars for the spot price, and been in basically the same position but with much easier options to liquidate it without waiting around for a check in the mail.

[joae1975]

I finally convinced an Austrian friend to dump some of his silver and buy bitcoin with it.  He found out that EuroPacific capital charges 3% to cash out of his silver position.  Yes, that's right.  Peter Schiff's company charges THREE PERCENT to get out of a position.  Of course he is never going to promote bitcoin when he can rape people that hard by plugging metals.

I bought silver/gold from europac and they told me there's 0 fee to liquidate gold and silver is 0.65 cents per oz.  That equates to ~3% at current price. 

[Keldel]

I like Peter Schiff, but he's not a super human. He admits himself, that he's just a normal person making simple observations about the economy. It's not that Peter Schiff is super smart, it's that mainstream economists are totally lost.

Peter Schiff doesn't understand bitcoin, and therefore he doesn't trust it. That is OK! If everyone trusted bitcoin, the world would already be different and it would be too late to profit from the wealth transfer. Take the thinking from Peter Schiff, not his conclusions. Apply that to bitcoin together with the knowledge you have. The result is a no-brainer at all

[btctraderr]

Peter's great, but he doesn't understand bitcoin or any of the technicalities behind it and why it's so great. He has a vested interest in promoting his metals business and that's all well and good. I think hes a great advocate for libertarians and is right on most things, he just needs to stick to what he knows.

[joae1975]

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/21580995/Peter%20Schiff.bitcoin.11.1.13.mp3

Another Peter Schiff bitcoin bubble speech.  I don't think he understands it.  He's a free market guy.  The bitcoin economy is full of free market forces.  I wish someone would call him on this point.  I'd do it but I suck at articulating my thoughts on the spot.

[MoonShadow]

Although I'll agree that Peter doesn't understand Bitcoin, I'll also say that he doesn't really need to understand bitcoin to make a reasonable assessment of speculation risk.  In this clip, he remains skeptical of bitcoins, and thinks that they have many halmarks of a bubble.  That's quite true from a traditional investment perspective.  Perhaps traditional investment perspectives don't apply (yet) to Bitcoin.  Who am I to disagree?  Anyone rational will go through all these same stages of distrust, although many of us proceeded much faster through the darkness than Peter has been.  I, for one, had real trouble believing that it was anything more than a scam in the early days; I just couldn't shake that idea that it could work.  And so I kept coming back and re-reading the white paper until it all 'clicked'.  I can now honestly claim that I understand how bitcoin functions, on a low/process level as well as a macro-economic level, better than 95%+ of the membership of this forum.  One day it will 'click' for Peter as well, along with the rest of humanity.  The vast majority of people will not know, nor need to know, how Bitcoin actually does what it claims to do; eventually they will just trust that it does it, in the same way that the public generally 'trusts' that the central banks know what they are doing and have much to lose by screwing it up.  (This is the real source of the "faith and credit" of the average Joe, the belief that the rich guys running the game have more to lose than Joe does if things go sideways; bitcoin will not alter the root source of the public trust either, most will simply start to trust bitcoin because they can see more and more big players who have much to lose puting their faith into it)

In short, Peter's distrust is rational at his own stage; and therefore warning callers (asking for his opinion) against bitcoin investing is also rational.

[joae1975]

At the same time I think Peter has a vested interest in not supporting bitcoin.  It steals customers from his gold silver business.  I've personally invested thousands into bitcoin where I would normally buy gold silver from Peter.  I don't think you can use the analogy of people blindly trusting central bankers the same as they trust bitcoin.  I think a better analogy would be trusting gold because of the chemistry that backs gold.  I.e.  It's molecular weight, atomic mass, etc.  Bitcoin's trust is within the realm of mathematics and gold with physics.  Central banking is all emotion, human, and full of error.  Understandably bitcoin was created by a human and physics have been created by humans, but they serve as boundaries for bitcoin & gold whereas central banking has no boundaries.

[bitcoin carpenter]

Saying bitcoins have no intrinsic value is like saying that freighters or trains have no value because they only transport the goods.
On that note gold and silver is more like the trucking industry vs the freight

[smoothie]

Peter Schiff is speaking on what he doesn't understanding. He is speculating on what people are or aren't doing with bitcoin.

If two people agree that bitcoin has a price it has a price. He is not addressing the actual use of evading government intervention into one's finances when it comes to border control and banking and how those tools control the populace in a financial means.

Gold and silver can be confiscated at the border(s). Bitcoin is able to go around this.

[smoothie]

From, "The Peter Schiff Show."  He doesn't discuss BTC often but I thought I would start compiling clips from his shows and post them as they appear.  It's been discussed on the show many times in the past but I have no idea when.  I never thought to compile it.  But I will from here on.  Peter does not think bitcoin has any intrinsic value.  He doesn't believe in it because you can't hold it and use it for anything else like gold/silver can.  But he does believe in the principle and idea governing it.

April 31, 2013.  Discussing Liberty Reserve and bitcoin.
http://db.tt/eZQSGXNa

Enjoy.

Looking in the archives, found this interview with Erik Voorhees by Guest host Tom Woods on March 8, 2013.
http://db.tt/mOmyDEb2

From June 20, 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTr_hTC90oQ - part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUxyr7cI0Zw - part 2

From June 21, 2011
http://youtu.be/QoopVDjXydE

Europac newsletter June, 2013
See article, "The Bitcoin Phoenix."
By: Andrew Schiff (sounds very bullish on BTC)
http://www.europac.net/research_analysis/newsletters/global_investor_newsletter_june_2013

June 25th, 2013 Peter Schiff show: - Peter is still skeptical...(~1:50 into audio)
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/21580995/pa_20130625kusg_low_01.mp3

July 2nd, 2013 Peter Schiff show: Peter talks about the Winkle twins and their new BTC ETF, funny at end.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/21580995/BTC%20Winkle%20and%20Peter.mp3

Oct. 4th, Peter talks about the Silk Road seizure
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/21580995/pa_20131004jghf_low.mp3

Nov 1st, Peter gives his bitcoin bubble speech.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/21580995/Peter%20Schiff.bitcoin.11.1.13.mp3

Just because you can't hold it doesn't mean it isn't viable.

Math is not tangible yet we believe in it. Bitcoin is based on math.

[BldSwtTrs]

Saying bitcoins have no intrinsic value is like saying that freighters or trains have no value because they only transport the goods.
On that note gold and silver is more like the trucking industry vs the freight

Saying bitcoin has no intrinsic value reveals how poorly he understands the most important concept in economics.

Nothing has intrinsic value, value is subjective. Goldbugs who criticizes the lack of intrinsic value of bitcoin are borderline retards.

[smoothie]

I finally convinced an Austrian friend to dump some of his silver and buy bitcoin with it.  He found out that EuroPacific capital charges 3% to cash out of his silver position.  Yes, that's right.  Peter Schiff's company charges THREE PERCENT to get out of a position.  Of course he is never going to promote bitcoin when he can rape people that hard by plugging metals.

This ^.

Peter does spout truth but the ultimate truth is that everyone will think in their best interests.

Peter missed the boat (so far) and doesn't really understand what "intrinsic" value bitcoin adds as a medium of exchange (not money as he so eloquently likes to claim Bitcoin is trying to be).

Bitcoin adds legitimacy to the currency in circulation. You can't really have tungesten filled bitcoins as you can have with gold and silver etc.

Bitcoin isn't better than gold necessarily. But it fills a demand for something that Gold and other PMs can't fill. The distance and speed issue with exchanging gold and silver etc bitcoin fills is what makes Bitcoin have "intrinsic" value or just value.

Of course Peter misses all of this. He only really looks at the possible bubble portion of the price mechanism of bit coin which is not that important. The price is in FIAT government created toilet paper which is meaningless really (in the end game).

[Seth Otterstad]

We already had the intrinsic value argument back on page one of this thread.  If you think Peter is spouting nonsense about intrinsic value, consider that this might be a clue that he doesn't know what he's talking about in quite a few areas.  How much longer do you want to wait for him to be "right"?  The way he phrases his predictions, he will certainly be right one day and the dollar will go to zero, but that is just useless information without a time-frame, and he is losing his clients tons of money by getting his timing off by decades.  While he is sitting around talking about how bad the US economy is, the Dow is up 134% since the bottom in '08, and US companies are outperforming Europe, emerging markets, and the entire world.  If you still think he is "right" after watching these videos....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4h_mEK91FWs
http://www.businessinsider.com/2009/1/peter-schiffs-clients-got-hosed-this-year-too
http://avaresearch.com/avanew/articles/713/The-Embarrassing-Track-Record-of-Robert-Prechter-Part-1.html
http://avaresearch.com/avanew/articles/302/Peter-Schiff-Wrong-on-the-Economy-Wrong-on-Healthcare-Part-1.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBNbdqp0-TI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUbhAbqKjOo
http://www.youtube.com/user/AntiSchiff

You will learn a lot more by firing up the intro to economics course on Khan Academy:
https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/macroeconomics/gdp-topic/econ-intro-in-macro-tutorial/v/introduction-to-economics

[cryptoanarchist]

I think Peter, like Chris Duane, is just trying to talk down bitcoin to help his precious metal sales. A lot of the money that is buying cryptocoins would be buying gold and silver if bitcoin never existed.

[Pumpkin]

1. Take the Peter Schiff's logic when he talks about the economy, US dollar and precious metals as future money.
2. Apply that to your knowledge of bitcoin.
3. Arrive at the conclusion that bitcoin is a screaming buy. If you don't see it yet, go to (1).
4.
5. Profit.

[BldSwtTrs]

How can Schiff who's been right about so many things, be so unable to comprehend bitcoin?

He is wrong about a lot of things too. For example when the first QE was announced he kept saying that interests will surge.

He was wrong about hyperinflation too. And when inflation didn't come he said that he was right but nobody can see it because CPI number is false.

It seems Austrian economists nowadays don't understand money multiplier and don't have ever heard about what happened in Japan this last 20 years.