The views expressed here are Jason Hommel’s, (and summarized and re-written by Grok 4.1), opinion based on Peter Schiff’s publicly stated positions over the past fifteen years.
For fifteen years Peter Schiff has insisted that Bitcoin has no value, cannot have value, and will soon have no value. He has repeated the claim through every price level—from $1 to $100,000—and through every supposed death knell. The market has answered him with a single, unbroken verdict: he is wrong, and the error is now total.
1. The Market Price Is the Only Honest Vote
Schiff’s flagship oft-repeated assertion is that Bitcoin “has no intrinsic value” and is therefore worthless. This is not an argument; it is a confession of personal incomprehension dressed as analysis.
If Bitcoin truly had no value, Schiff—or any other critic—could sell their entire holdings to anyone for $300 apiece and remain indifferent. No one has ever made or taken that offer, not once, not even for a single coin. The refusal is decisive proof: the market price is real, enforceable, and (as of November 2025) hovering near $86,000. To declare an asset simultaneously worthless and impossible to buy at a discount is not skepticism; it is self-contradiction.
Value in economics is determined by revealed market preference, not individual philosophical approval by people on the sidelines. Two trillion dollars of capital, 150 million wallets, eleven spot ETFs, and multiple sovereign treasuries have all voted the same way. Against the opinion, “I don’t understand why people want it” which is neither argument nor evidence.
2. The Perpetual Retreat to “Eventually Zero”
When pressed on the obvious market price, critics pivot: “Fine, it has a price today, but it will go to zero tomorrow.” This is no longer analysis; it is prophecy. Prophecy is unfalsifiable, and therefore worthless as argument.
Schiff has predicted Bitcoin’s imminent collapse at $30, $1,000, $10,000, $20,000, $69,000, and every point in between. Each forecast has expired worthless while the price marched higher. After four separate 80–90 % drawdowns—all of which were declared “the final capitulation”—Bitcoin made new all-time highs. The broken-clock thesis has been tested for a decade and a half and has failed every single time.
A prediction that survives only by moving the goalposts forever is not a serious investment thesis; it is a religious conviction.
3. Regulatory Death Is Structurally Impossible
The final refuge of the critic is “governments will ban it.” This argument worked once—against gold in 1933—because gold is physical, custodial, and concentratable.
Bitcoin is none of those things. And Bitcoin was designed to be unstoppable money in many ways.
Private keys can be memorized or etched on steel plates.
The ledger lives on 60,000+ full nodes in 100+ countries.
Peer-to-peer trading platforms (Bisq, Hodl Hodl, LocalBitcoins successors) operate without KYC.
Fifty nations have already tried bans; every single one failed to stop adoption and merely relocated mining and trading.
The United States spent 41 years (1933–1974) making private gold ownership illegal; it worked because the government knew where the gold was. No government on earth knows where every bitcoin is. A 1933-style confiscation of Bitcoin is as feasible as confiscating every whispered conversation.
Meanwhile, the political tide has reversed: spot ETFs are approved, public companies hold it on balance sheets, and the incoming Trump administration (2025) is openly pro-Bitcoin. The “regulatory risk = death” thesis died quietly sometime around January 2024 when BlackRock’s ETF went live.
4. Gold’s Supposed Superiority Collapses on Contact
Schiff’s positive case is that gold is the only real money because it is tangible, scarce, and historically proven. Bitcoin is more scarce (fixed 21 million vs. gold’s perpetual 1.5–2 % annual inflation), more portable (zero weight, instant global transmission), more verifiable (public blockchain vs. assays and trust), and more seizure-resistant (see above). Gold required 5,000 years to become money; Bitcoin did it in fifteen.
Gold mining consumes 0.3–0.5 % of global energy every year—roughly the same order of magnitude as Bitcoin mining—yet produces a commodity whose supply grows forever. Bitcoin’s energy use secures a monetary network whose supply schedule is mathematically capped and whose issuance will effectively end in 115 years from now. The “wasteful energy” argument is, at best, a wash.
5. What Remains When the Rhetoric Is Stripped Away
After removing the three pillars—(a) no value today, (b) inevitable collapse tomorrow, (c) governments will kill it—almost nothing of Schiff’s critique survives.
Yes, Bitcoin is volatile. So are all young, high-growth assets.
Yes, the base layer is slow and expensive for coffee purchases. That is why Lightning and stablecoins exist.
Yes, energy is consumed. So is every other monetary and industrial system on earth.
These are engineering problems, not ontological ones.
None of them imply the asset must go to zero. They are preferences, not proofs.
6. The Final Translation
When every layer of Schiff’s argumentation is peeled back, what remains is a single honest sentence:
“I do not understand why other people value Bitcoin.”
That is not an argument. It is an admission. And after fifteen years of being wrong at every measurable turn, we should take him at his word: he does not understand it. The market does. Nation-states do. Pension funds do. Hundreds of millions of individuals do.
The burden of proof flipped years ago. It is no longer incumbent on Bitcoin’s advocates to explain why it has value; it is incumbent on its critics to explain why—after surviving everything thrown at it—it still should not.
They have no answer that survives contact with reality.
Peter Schiff’s critique of Bitcoin began as a hypothesis. It has aged into a cautionary tale about the dangers of mistaking personal incomprehension for objective truth. The train left the station long ago. He is still on the platform shouting that metal boxes on rails can never replace horses.
History has already rendered its verdict.
For more on my favorite cryptocurrency, one designed to improve on Bitcoin, see: