Peter Schiff on Bitcoin

[420]

Nov 13, 2013 Peter is at the Money Show in New Orleans.  He opens his show talking about bitcoin.  I just put the whole show up.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/21580995/PeterShiffShow.btc.11.13.13.mp3

Edit: Talk continues with callers at 1:13:20.

goody goody

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[AnonyMint]

Bitcoin has been designed very well and I can't think of much better features to add for it

Strongly disagree. Mining was designed to be cartelized. Coin rewards diminish asymptotically towards 0 (1/2 of all coins to be issued were in first 4 years) thus the masses can never get into this coin, because wealthy don't spend rather they accumulate more by investing. Mining can't be done with the PCs that the masses already own.

Bitcoin is the dystopian outcome if it succeeds to suck in $trillions of market cap around the $1,000,000 price point. I think don't think it will get that far. The logical conclusion is there can't be possibly be only one. There must arise competition.

So in that sense, Peter Schiff is correct. The coin supply will not remain limited at Bitcoin's dystopian choice. Competition will debase Bitcoin and add more supply via liquid exchanges between coins. This can't happen with physical gold and silver, yet these have disadvantages when used in trade over distance especially.

While it's possible for bitcoins to go to zero, the only way that happens now is if there is some tragic & unfixable flaw discovered in the protocol that gives Bitcoin it's 'intrinsic value' to start with.

Yes I found that flaw. Can't be fixed because of the vested interests in Bitcoin and the uber critical need to maintain consensus to keep the exponential price trend intact.

Bitcoin will not go to zero tomorrow (or possibly ever) and the exponential price trend will continue for a while.

[smoothie]

Today's show had the best caller challenge yet.  But he waits until the end of the show and they have no time.  Please listen to the end.  He goes on an amusing tangent about Janet Yellen then back to bitcoin.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/21580995/Peter.Schiff.bitcoin.11.14.13.mp3

The bitcoin defenders are poor in understanding here, particularly the first one, but Peter does make some good points here.  Gold cannot go to a use value of zero, while it's possible that Bitcoins can.  Granted, if gold were to drop to it's 'intrinsic value' it would be somewhat comparable to the value of lead, maybe slightly more due to much lower toxicity, but close.  Considering that refined lead is under a dollar a pound right now, that would represent something on the order of a 99.99% loss in value.  "You didn't lose everything, you've still got .01% of your life savings!  Don't Jump!"

While it's possible for bitcoins to go to zero, the only way that happens now is if there is some tragic & unfixable flaw discovered in the protocol that gives Bitcoin it's 'intrinsic value' to start with.  Again, possible; but the tragic and unfixable flaws with using electronic precious metal deposit receipts as an online trade currency are, if not altogether obvious, already demonstrated by the folding of both Egold.com and the persecution of the Liberty Dollar.  Governments will not suffer any competitor to exist if they can help it, but they can't help it with Bitcoin.

That last caller seemed to know his stuff, but was cut off by Peter before he could actually finish the argument.

Prove it. There are some scenario's where gold would become of no use (say a global catastrophic event that wipes out most of the population and technology sending us back to the cave man days, basically).

[smoothie]

So who here (btc community) will step up and call his radio show and debate his position on bitcoin?  I can't do it, I suck.  I get it but I'll choke up on the air.  Who can best debate Peter?  Max Keiser?  Peter was just on Max's show in London.
http://youtu.be/MNXmL771mBA
 I'm sure Max would return the favor.

Max would rip Peter to shreds on the topic of bitcoin.

Trace Mayer already did. 

[smoothie]

peter schiff is a smart guy but he is comparing apples to oranges when he compares bitcoin to gold. no one uses gold as money anymore.

It is because he has special interests for his business and his customers which most of it is Precious Metals related.

[smoothie]

http://youtu.be/0VrB1Ae3xqs

That's not what I'm talking about at all.  On that point, Peter is correct.  Bitcoin is not gold, but nor is it fiat.  It's something altogether new and different from either, that is designed to do the best job of either. 

What I'm talking about is Peter's talk about intrinsic value.  Not only is gold's "intrinsic value" such a small part of it's market value as to be practically irrelevent, he argues that bitcoin's don't have an intrinsic value economicly.  I can easily prove that they do.  The only kind of intrinsic value of anything, is how useful it is to the marketplace. While gold does have physical properties that are useful to industry, and silver has chemical properties useful to both industry and medicine; neither of these 'intrinsic' uses have value to the market to compete with their monetary uses, because the market will always be looking for methods of achieving the same ends using cheaper inputs.  A great example is the use of silver in antibacterial products; while it works great and has been well known to medicine for over a century, silver is not often used in medicine except in the most dire of applications, wherein our modern anti-bacterial sciences fail us too regularly.  I.E. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus  While bitcoins have no physical properties to exploit, they were designed to significantly uncut the market costs of the transfer of value over distances.  This 'feature' alone provides bitcoin's "intrinsic value", even if it's next least expensive competitor in kind is what most determines what that "intrinsic value" should actually be.  Neither Visa nor Western-Union have the power to undercut Bitcoin in this market, without first becoming Bitcoin themselves.

And that is not even considering the "intrinsic value" of blockchain enforcible digital contracts, should they ever become common.

Peter has claimed bitcoin is fiat on many occasions. This proves wither he has no clue what he is talking about or he is trying to recoup the credibility he lost on ALL of his "bitcoin is going to crash and people will lose money" claims.

[Pumpkin]

I'm listening to Peter Schiff's radio shows (http://www.schiffradio.com/).

He understands that bitcoin is complex. There are people want to explain it to him and his audience, yet he does not give them time on purpose. That's how he wins. By giving 1-2 minutes to explain bitcoin. We all know it's not possible.

Very disappointing. If bitcoin catches on, he will have lost his audience millions of USD just because he's butthurt about his gold investments.

[tvbcof]

I'm listening to Peter Schiff's radio shows (http://www.schiffradio.com/).

He understands that bitcoin is complex. There are people want to explain it to him and his audience, yet he does not give them time on purpose. That's how he wins. By giving 1-2 minutes to explain bitcoin. We all know it's not possible.

Very disappointing. If bitcoin catches on, he will have lost his audience millions of USD just because he's butthurt about his gold investments.

I've yet to hear him 'win' at all.  To people who have some technical grasp, or even a grasp of generic logic for that matter, most of his points are rather absurd.

If he 'wins', it's in a obtuse loudmouth bully kind of way popularize by the mainstream media.  Many mouth-breather types may well come away with the impression that he has 'won', but who cares?  It's their loss.  That's why such people typically do not have nice things.

Schiff's show seems to be a cut-out of Fox news with idiotic sound effect and the like.  I can only visualize some fat fuck listening from his trailer house in between rounds of substance abuse and wife-beating.

[AnonyMint]

Peter has claimed bitcoin is fiat on many occasions. This proves wither he has no clue what he is talking about or he is trying to recoup the credibility he lost on ALL of his "bitcoin is going to crash and people will lose money" claims.

I wonder if he realizes why he is correct? I doubt it (he probably thinks Bitcoin's decentralized technology can be stopped with regulation alone, which is unlikely)

After 2033 (<1%) and 2040 (<0.2%), then coin rewards for Bitcoin diminish asymptotically towards 0. Thus there is no funding for miners, if a cartel of miners does the well-known "transactions withholding attack".

In other words, Amazon.com supplies a downloadable or online client (that merchants all over the web adopt because Amazon pays them to) and Amazon might even juice up the offer with 0% tx fees (to entice more transactions to them), then they do not forward these transactions to other independent miners who are not part of their cartel. Thus those other miners do not get sufficient funding to pay their electricity and hardware amortization costs.

This is just one way that Bitcoin can be taken over by cartels. And actually Satoshi wrote about this and thought this was fine. And the core devs know this too and think it is fine.

There a new attack released this month. Read that linked post, I am not against Bitcoin, I may even buy some.

So once Bitcoin is in the hands of cartels, then the government can regulate the cartels. So then they can easily change the protocol to anything they want.

If you believe in the theory that network effects are insurmountable, then it would be too late at that time to launch an altcoin (or fork Bitcoin) to compete.

Sorry to bust your fantasy bubble about Bitcoin. Better to be knowledgeable and realistic. Bitcoin is a great advance, but it is not yet perfected and the core devs will refuse any such necessary changes.

[MoonShadow]

Peter has claimed bitcoin is fiat on many occasions. This proves wither he has no clue what he is talking about or he is trying to recoup the credibility he lost on ALL of his "bitcoin is going to crash and people will lose money" claims.

No, it just shows his bias.  Since it's not gold, and to him that is a bad thing, then bitcoin is substandard.  Calling it fiat is a shortcut to his audience.  He knows it's not fiat, really.

[Jandur]

Can someone just please respond to him by stating gold is infinitely divisible? Has anyone tried that with him?

[MoonShadow]

Prove it. There are some scenario's where gold would become of no use (say a global catastrophic event that wipes out most of the population and technology sending us back to the cave man days, basically).

Yes, there are some astronomicly unlikely disaster scenarios that gold would not be of any use.  Neither would anything else be, for that matter.  Returning to a gold standard without any central banking or fractional reserve lending is vastly more likely, however.  No matter how advanced a society we become, and no matter how successful Bitcoin (or other cryptocurrency) ever becomes, gold & silver will have a value.  Peter's point is that, in the absence of that modern industrial society, wherein trustless transfer of value over distances no longer has it's own use value, that it's possible that Bitcoin will not have an another use value.  

Even then, if the human species has not been wiped out, I can think of several non-monetary uses for gold.  If you lived 500 years ago (assuming gold had no monetary value) what would you do with it?  That exact scenario played out with platinum, since it was so uncommon that the Spanish had no experience or understanding of it, they used it as if it was common scrap metal.  They made cannons and ship ballasts out of it.  If I were to survive a complete breakdown of modern industrial society, and lived anywhere near the ocean, the first thing that I'd be trying to get is a boat.  And gold plating would not only make a wonderful external ballast, but since it cannot corrode it would also make a great hull skin to protect a wooden hull from rot and barnacles.  Anyone with a seaworthy boat can scratch a living from the sea today, as the somewhat famous boat peoples of asia have well proven.  Athough it'd be wise to keep one's distance from the island of Japan.

[tvbcof]

Can someone just please respond to him by stating gold is infinitely divisible? Has anyone tried that with him?

Gold is NOT infinitely divisible:

  Molar mass of Au = 196.96655 g/mol

It is true both that:

 - Bitcoin is much less divisible that Au.

 - Bitcoin could be more divisible than Au with some coding changes.

---

But the whole argument of divisibility is silly and stupid and exposes a complete lack of understanding about much of anything.

Schiff's point is that a portion of Bitcoin is worthless because Bitcoin itself is worthless and zero divided by anything is still zero.  I'm starting to re-balance, and my bank account paints a starkly different picture that what Schiff is asserting.  I intend to re-balance into PM's in fact. 

Bitcoin and PM's have a remarkable level of potential symbiosis for someone who is not a closed-minded and ignorant doofus.

[MoonShadow]

Can someone just please respond to him by stating gold is infinitely divisible? Has anyone tried that with him?

Yes, the second bitcoin caller on that link tried it, but Peter just talked over him and wouldn't let him finish that point; declaring that it's not true and/or not the same.  Which, of course, is bullshit on Peter's part.

[AnonyMint]

Can someone just please respond to him by stating gold is infinitely divisible? Has anyone tried that with him?

Yes, the second bitcoin caller on that link tried it, but Peter just talked over him and wouldn't let him finish that point; declaring that it's not true and/or not the same.  Which, of course, is bullshit on Peter's part.

You are conflating divisibility with mass.

No one can create 84 million new mass units of physical gold out-of-thin-air, but Litecoin did w.r.t. to Bitcoin.

There is a liquid exchange between LTC and BTC. Thus LTC expanded the money supply. Only a fraction so far, because the value of LTC is so low relative to BTC. I read today that at least one person is just waiting for the hashrate of the LTC network to reach critical mass (to be sure the network is secure) before buying in.

[BlackBison]

Can someone just please respond to him by stating gold is infinitely divisible? Has anyone tried that with him?

Yes, the second bitcoin caller on that link tried it, but Peter just talked over him and wouldn't let him finish that point; declaring that it's not true and/or not the same.  Which, of course, is bullshit on Peter's part.

No one can create 84 million new units of gold, but Litecoin did w.r.t. to Bitcoin.

Yes that diluted the overall share of bitcoin in the cryptocurrency 'sector' from say 100% to 99%, but so what. Better a smaller share of a larger pie right?

Any valuable technology sector has multiple actors in it, not just one monopoly. Alts like ltc provide redundancy in case of a catastrophe or an alternative if bitcoin becomes idealogically unsound to some people causing large divides in the community (see the heated debate about Mike Hearn and blacklisting).

Anyone who thinks that the bitcoin community will remain totally in agreement in the future is simply either an idiot or protecting their btc holdings with their fanatically closed minded preaching (a la Goldbugs).

'Just fork bitcoin instead' I hear you cry. That isn't going to work as well. Too much confusion. Also you might get a new power struggle etc with the forking teams. Better to have competing alts in parallel the whole time. Ltc and its highly competent dev team (or someone else) can snap at Bitcoins heels continuously 'keeping them in line' and doing a good honest job.

[AnonyMint]

BlackBison our logic is the same on all your points. Thanks.

Yes we are aware of the issue with coin taint and the bizarre solution proposed by Google (ahem I mean Mike Hearn who only works for Google):

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=330230.msg3593844#msg3593844

I was entirely unfair above. Mike Hearn adamantly claims Google does not influence what he does with his "20% time", i.e. you probably know Google employees get one day a week to do what ever they want.

I think the most salient point is diversification. Monolithic anything is Antifragile:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=330230.msg3595067#msg3595067
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=180798.msg3594370#msg3594370

Decentralized competition is where we are headed (I hope). And very much agreed that separate entities can compete whereas trying to compete within a centralized consensus requirement is not competition.

[Singlebyte]

Funny thing is, while Peter bashes bitcoin on his talk show thousands of new people are introduced to BTC.  These listeners will do their own research and come to conclusions on their own.  I see a lot of BTC converts just from his show!    More news the better.......

[Zarathustra]

Actually, this (misconception) points out very clearly why Bitcoin/Gold are on the same side opposite modern day fiat.

Modern day fiat monetary systems are almost all 'debt based'.  The currency is actually created by someone going into debt and extinguished by someone going out of debt through one means or another.  The paradox is that if there were not debt, there would be no money.  This explains, among other things, why pretty much everyone and every corporate and government is in debt.

Money has always been debt based. The state mafia indebted the people from the very beginning with a tax (debt ex nihilo).
To pay this debt you had to produce more than a stateless, selfsufficient community, and that enforces the nationalized people (society) to borrow more and more.
The state mafia itself is also indebted from the very beginning. The henchmen get a promise by the state mafia to be paid with the money they have to collect.
Debt is always the base of the money, wheter it is backed by metal, grain or any other property, which is the case today. Private debt is backed by private property.

[MoonShadow]

Actually, this (misconception) points out very clearly why Bitcoin/Gold are on the same side opposite modern day fiat.

Modern day fiat monetary systems are almost all 'debt based'.  The currency is actually created by someone going into debt and extinguished by someone going out of debt through one means or another.  The paradox is that if there were not debt, there would be no money.  This explains, among other things, why pretty much everyone and every corporate and government is in debt.

Money has always been debt based. The state mafia indebted the people from the very beginning with a tax (debt ex nihilo).

This is a falsehood.