DEBATE: Gold vs. Bitcoin (Peter Schiff and Mark Moss)

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Welcome to the Zero Hedge debate. The topic tonight is which is superior money, Bitcoin or gold, and could either become the global reserve currency. I'm your host and moderator, Ash Bennington. We're joined tonight by two very well-known guests, Peter Schiff, chief economist at Euro Pacific Asset Management, and Mark Moss, host of the Mark Moss Show. Gentlemen, welcome to both of you.

>> Thank you. Thank you so much. Listen, we're going to jump in in just a second here, but I want to set this up with this tweet from Zero Hedge. "Regime shift really kicking in. Gold -13% since the start of the Iran war. Bitcoin +6%." So maybe the opposite of what you think would happen, uh, in a geopolitical risk-on period. We're here to talk about all that and more tonight. Uh, by the way, by pre-arranged uh arrangement, we decided uh that uh Peter is going to go first. Peter, give us your view, your context around this question. Which is superior money, Bitcoin or gold, and could either become the global reserve currency? You're going to surprise the world, Peter, if you say Bitcoin.

>> Well, first of all, I don't even think there's a contest because I don't think Bitcoin qualifies as any kind of money. So, it certainly doesn't win a monetary battle versus gold. And in fact, gold is not going to become the reserve currency. Gold is money. Gold is a reserve asset that backs up currencies. What gives currency value is the gold that that backs it up. The problem with fiat currencies is that they're backed by nothing. Legitimate currencies are backed by gold. But I think that foreign central banks are already moving more of their US dollar reserves into gold because they are losing confidence in the US dollar, in the ability of the US government to pay its debts in honest money without resorting to a printing press. So I think that's the main reason that gold uh rose from 2,000 to 5,000 before the recent pullback. You know, now it's around 4,400. And yes, gold has gone down quite a bit since the beginning of the Iran war. I don't know if Bitcoin is actually up 6%. I mean, it looks about the same to me. It's, you know, 68,000. I mean, that's about where it's been for months. So, I don't know that Bitcoin has gotten any real bounce from the war, but it's held up surprisingly well. I would have expected Bitcoin to have fallen. I think it's going to fall. It's just taking a little bit longer. And I think gold's decline going to prove to be short-lived. I think the reason that gold sold off is more of a liquidity uh event and the markets got caught off guard by the Fed's about-face on rates and now uh not only do people expect the Fed not to cut in 2026, but now people think the Fed might hike and that has hurt gold. But I don't think um the postponement of rate cuts is negative for gold because while the Fed is sitting on hold and even if the Fed were to notch rates up slightly, inflation is going to soar so much in 2026, real rates are going to collapse. And that's that's bullish for gold.

But just to quickly get to the the why gold is money and why Bitcoin is not, the most important uh characteristic that money has is it needs to be the most liquid commodity. And it has to be a commodity because it has to have its own use independent of its use as a medium of exchange and a unit of account. Uh it needs to be used for something. I mean, gold is used in industry. It's used in jewelry. It's used in aerospace. It's used in medicine. It's used in uh in computers and electronics. It's the most useful metal on the periodic table. Now, it also has a lot of other characteristics that make it better money than other commodities that you could use. It's more divisible. It's more portable. It's more fungible. It's more transportable. And ironically, blockchain and the internet actually make gold even better money because it improves on those properties because you can tokenize gold and now gold becomes even more divisible, even more portable, uh even more fungible. It makes it better money in the modern age than it's ever been. Uh whereas Bitcoin, uh like fiat currency, has no intrinsic value. It has no use. It derives its value based on confidence and belief. And the only real source of demand for Bitcoin uh comes from speculators who want to gamble uh that the market price of Bitcoin might appreciate. And you know, the other uh core characteristic of money is it needs to be a store of value. So it could be used uh as a medium of deferred payment. I can borrow money and I can repay it and you know, people know that the money is going to hold its value. Well, gold stores its value because gold is a valuable metal that has a use. There are people who need gold. Jewelers need gold. You know, computer companies need gold. Central banks need gold. And gold doesn't decay. Uh it it doesn't deteriorate over time. Uh it's unique among commodities in that respect. That the gold we have today is exactly the same as it was a thousand years ago, a billion years ago, and it will be exactly the same a billion years from now. Gold holds all of its properties intact. Uh and so it can store value over time. But Bitcoin has no actual value. You can't confuse value with price. Bitcoin has a price because anything can have a price and people are dumb enough to to buy it. So, Bitcoin has a price, but it doesn't have any underlying value. And you can't store price. You can store value, but not price. So, Bitcoin can't be money because it doesn't have any underlying value that can be stored. And it's not an actual commodity. It doesn't have any real value that you would exchange for other commodities uh for goods and services. you know, it's not a viable alternative uh to a barter system because if somebody gives you Bitcoin in exchange for your goods or services, they've given you nothing. Whereas, if somebody gives you gold, they've given you a valuable commodity that can be worth uh the value of the services or the goods that you provided in exchange.

>> Yeah. Well, one of the things that makes this a debate is that I imagine Mark is going to have a differing view about that. Let me just say here, top of the show, uh Mark, we're filming right now. We're live on Zero Hedge at Mar on March 26, uh 2026 at about uh 7:00 p.m. Uh that tweet uh with the original change in price was from March 19 at 8:00 p.m. Uh so one week, essentially a lifetime in the co in the course of Bitcoin price action, and I imagine Mark is going to speak to that. Mark, uh what are your thoughts about it? you uh you heard the opening idea for this show, which is the question about the idea of moneyiness, Bitcoin versus gold, and whether one could potentially become a reserve currency. What are your thoughts? How do you respond to Peter's opening statement?

>> Yeah, Peter covered a lot of ground there. I was trying to make some mental notes, but he covered every single argument we're going to cover for the next hour and a half. Uh we'll have to go through them one by one and we certainly have answers for all those. But I'm going to start by saying, Ash, the topic that you're asking about is the future. And so really, the question is about the future. And all Peter wants to talk about is 5,000 years in the past. And so what happens is technology changes. And sure, candles were light for 5,000 years, but now we have electricity. So things change. And so I think the topic we're talking about is the future, not the past. So every time he keeps bringing back 5,000 years of history, let's keep that in mind. But I do want to say, first of all, Peter and I have had some great conversations before. Uh I I got to speak at his mastermind down in Mexico City, Shift Sovereign, by the way. Uh Sovereign Man newsletter was very instrumental in my thinking. So shout out to that. And I also say that, um, maybe to surprise a lot of people here, Peter Schiff is one of the reasons I'm actually in this chair right now. In 2008, I got crushed in the Great Financial Crash. Okay. Uh I was all in on Southern California real estate and it dropped about 60% in 12 months. And that's what started my entire journey to learn about the macroeconomic system, to learn about the financial system that we're in today. And it was guys like Mike Maloney and Peter Schiff that taught me about fiat and fiat currency and the problems when you print unlimited amounts of money and the leverage that builds up in the banking system. They taught me about gold. And I realized it was unlimited money printing and leverage that built up that caused the problem. I learned about Austrian economics from people like Peter. Uh I became a gold bug because of people like Peter. I believe that that that gold was the answer to the fiat problem. Sound money was the r was the thing. I watched I watched Peter, I watched him call the housing crisis when nobody else was screaming about it. So, you know, I watched that. Congratulations. I've I've seen his financial analysis on government debt and deficits. It's brilliant. I take his framework seriously, right? I agree with it. I agree that sound money matters. I agree that debt-based systems will collapse. And of course, I believe I agree that you can't print your way to prosperity. So, I agree with all that. So, this isn't going to really be a debate about gold versus Bitcoin. I believe this debate is about what Peter's own framework points to when you follow it all the way to the conclusion. When you follow it all the way to the end. Now, I've had these conversations, like I said, with Peter before. Uh I've watched several of his debates as well. And so, again, and he already told us what he's going to tell us. Gold's been money for 5,000 years. He's right. There's no debate. He's going to tell us that the problem started when we layered debt on top of gold, when we turned an equity-based system for final settlement money into a system of claims and trust and IOU's. And he's right about that too. So the question that I want to answer today is simple: If the problem was building a trust-based debt layer on top of gold, why would the solution today that he's proposing be building another trust-based layer on top of gold? Because that's what tokenized gold is. It's a claim. It's not final settlement. It requires a custodian. It requires a vault. It requires jurisdiction, an auditor. More importantly, your trust and your trust that none of those fail. And I agree with Peter. I agree with all the gold bugs. Gold didn't fail humanity. But for it to continue to work as global commerce and transactions pick up, continue to speed up, as transaction time is now at speed of light, we need settlement at the speed of light. And for gold to work, it requires a trust layer on top of gold to speed that up, to get the transaction times up. And that's what caused it to fail humanity. So, I'll just say, I'll finish it by saying that Bitcoin is the first monetary network in history that doesn't need a debt layer. It doesn't need trust. It is a settlement itself.

>> Well, I'm glad we can start with a point of agreement here, uh, because it helps to frame the debate. But let me, Mark, let me ask you, uh, one follow-up question. And by the way, I'm here to be aggressively neutral and just get your views out. But let me ask you this. You talked about the things that you agree with Peter on. You talked about your view about gold. Let me just ask you to start out this portion of the debate. Why Bitcoin? Tell us about that piece of your journey and why you have uh gone into it at a 90-degree angle.

>> Yeah, well, uh, we'll pick up right where I left off. Right. So, I would imagine. Well, I agree with Peter again. We we agree that gold was good money. Gold was great money. Gold was the best one. It evolved to become the best money, right? And it worked because it wasn't a claim. It wasn't debt. I could hold it in my hand. When I had it, it was final settlement. It was physical. So, if I have it, you know, I have it. If I pass it to you, you have it. No counterparty risk, right? It wasn't a claim on debt. It wasn't someone's liability. It was equity, right? And I I'm sure we agree on that. But if we go back through history, we understand that around 1500, as global trade started to prosper and trade times got shorter and shorter and shorter, gold didn't work anymore for that process. So about 1500 in Florence, Italy, we had a new technological innovation. It was called the ledger in double-entry accounting. And the gold went into a custodian, and we issued a ledger on top of it, and someone would keep track of that ledger and introduced a bug into the financial system that we've never been able to recover from. And that bug is trust. And we can see from the creation of the central bank in uh in the Bank of England in the late 1600s and all the bank closures and all the times they've stole gold and revalued gold, all the times happened in the United States, 1933, stealing the gold, always inflating the ledger, always censoring, stopping, blocking the jurisdiction problems that it causes. And we can see why gold failed. It's easy to understand that. And so to think that we could just go back to a gold system today would also have to imagine we'd have to go back to the to the dark ages. But we're moving into a we're moving into a technological-driven world. And so as I said before, like the the the transaction times have only sped up. We're in a hyperconnected, AI-driven, internet-driven economy today. And we're doing Zoom right now, and and transactions are happening at the speed of light. And so we need a a Bitcoin that can, or I'm sorry, a money, something that can provide final settlement without having to layer on debt on top of it and without having to trust a central third party.

[snorts] And I I'll add one more piece before I before I conclude just this section. But on top of that, it's not just about the final settlement. It's about property rights. So when I had gold, I had gold, as I said, and and I have the gold and I could pass you the gold. But the problem with any other type of money that we might use or or debt that we would add on top of this, then it becomes siloed, it becomes permissioned, and it becomes controlled. And so as the world continues to break apart, as you started talking about the war in Iran and sort of what that's doing to markets right now, as the world continues to break apart and that trust globally continues to degrade, we need the ability to hold my wealth, hold my asset in a way that can't be confiscated and the ability to transact or or to to yeah, to transact without censorship. And so those things, like I said, if I follow them to the conclusion, lead me to Bitcoin.

>> Yeah.

>> Peter, what say you?

>> All right. Well, I got a few points here that I want to I want to push back on. So, first of all, gold did not fail. Um, when the Federal Reserve was established in 1913, gold was $20. It's now $4,400. That sounds like success. What failed was the Federal Reserve, the US government, fiat money. That's what failed. It's government that failed to honor the gold standard, to stay on it, because the gold standard interfered with the ambitions of politicians. The gold standard kept our politicians honest. They didn't want to be honest. And so they had to leave the gold standard in order to be dishonest. In order to promise the voters something for nothing and run up massive debt. Gold stood in their way. And that's why we went off that standard. Not because gold failed, but because we failed uh to live up to it. Gold. Gold succeeded.

Now, getting to your points about trust and and debt. First of all, Bitcoin is not trustless. There's a lot of trust inherent in Bitcoin. First of all, a lot of people keep their Bitcoin with third parties. They put it on an exchange. They own it through an ETF. They own a company-like strategy. So, there are a lot of people that trust third parties with Bitcoin. And and why do they do that? Because it's easier. It's more convenient than self-custody and and and having your own secret word and private key, all that stuff. So there are people that that that want their Bitcoin with third parties because it's easier to trade it or whatever they want to do with it. Um, and so the same thing is true with gold. I I can store my own gold myself or I can trust it with a third party. I can I can buy a gold ETF. I can send my gold to a vault uh, you know, in Switzerland or Singapore. I don't have to vault it myself. Or I can have tokenized gold. Now, tokenized gold is gold. The token simply represents a receipt to prove that you own it. And so if I want to settle a transaction and the payment is going to be in gold, I can physically hand you my gold or I can transfer you my token that represents ownership of the gold. So the gold doesn't move. What moves is who owns it and the payment is final. If I send you my gold and I give you the token as opposed to the physical metal, now you own that physical metal. There's no debt involved. It is final settlement. You have legal title to that gold. You can go pick it up whenever you want, but why bother? Just leave it there safe in a vault and you can hold uh the certificate that proves uh that you own it. But the biggest trust I think in Bitcoin is trust in the fact that people are going to continue to want it. I don't have to trust that people are going to want gold. They've always wanted gold because gold fulfills a particular purpose. Bitcoin is here today. It's been around 15, 16 years. Most people didn't even hear about it until maybe four or five years ago, but it's it's around. But who the hell knows if it's going to be around in another 15 years? There are thousands of other cryptos out there that people could buy instead of Bitcoin. I mean, there's really no substantive difference other than the fact that Bitcoin is just more popular.

>> Maybe before we throw every argument out there, let's just deal with

>> I'm just trying to address the points that you made. You made a bunch of points. So now I got to address them all at once. Um and so there's a lot of trust. You got to trust that people are going to believe that nothing is something. I don't want to make that leap of faith. I don't want to put my life savings into a token and hope that in the future people still value it. People still want it. I'd rather hold my savings in gold knowing that people will always want gold. People will always need gold. Gold will always have value. It has a history, thousands of years of being desirable and retaining its value. I mean, Bitcoin could be a passing fad. You don't know that for sure. Uh you don't know who's going to want Bitcoin. You know, Bitcoin had, you know, it came on the scene and it had this big run-up, but over the last four and a half years, it's down 60% priced in gold. The biggest buyer of Bitcoin in the world, Michael Saylor for Strategy, is has spent over $50 billion buying Bitcoin, and he's down. His average cost is $76,000. The current price is $68,000. The biggest buyer of Bitcoin has lost money buying Bitcoin. Whereas had he bought gold, he'd be way ahead. So,

>> All right, guys. I want to just break this down into small digestible chunks here. I know you both have a lot to say, and I want to give you a chance to address each individual point. So, let's see if we can just go back and forth on these points. Hit them one at a time. Go ahead, Mark. Why don't you jump in and and pick

>> Yeah, that that's what I'd like as well, Ash, because these are all great points, and I'd want to I'd love to hit each one. I think it'd be a lot of value for the for the listeners. But let's just jump back in because again, like I learned so much from Peter. I became a gold bug because of Peter and Mike Maloney. I mean, for for real, right? And so, it's kind of weird for me now to sit here and listen to him tell me the same thing. As I said, like we're talking about the future, but he wants to keep talking about the past, but for some reason, we keep wanting to go back and live in the past, which I don't understand that. So,

>> Gold is the future.

>> Well, okay. It's it's the future. So, I guess let's just go through this again. So gold was good money because I could hold it. It wasn't a claim. It wasn't debt. I had it. It was equity, right? And the problem became is when we layered debt on top of it, an IOU, a claim, and the person, the government, whoever manipulated how much they said they had and then took the gold. They decided not to give not to make it redeemable. That's what happened. Correct. So, right. Okay. So, if that's what happened, now what you're saying is, well, let's just try the same thing, but this time we'll be nicer. This time we won't manipulate how many we say we have on the ledger. This time we won't close the window. This time we won't say that you can't redeem it again. So, it's like

>> Centralization always leads to manipulation. The pro the problem is humans. The problems is humans. And the problem is always going to be when you're dealing with something physical, as you said, like you could take that tokenized gold receipt. The IOU is the claim, the debt, whatever you want to call it.

>> It's not an IOU. It's a representative of ownership. It's just proof that you own something.

>> It's not an IOU. You own the gold.

>> The token is just, you know, representative of who owns it. And I can, it's negotiable.

>> Like a paper gold certificate.

>> I can send you my token and now you own the gold.

>> Like a paper gold certificate. And I owe you. It's a claim, whatever you want to call it.

>> IOU is when somebody lo you've loaned somebody money. In tokenized gold, if you do it the right way, the gold is yours. It's in your name. It's in a vault. You It's the token is just It's like if you go uh into a restaurant and you check your coat and they give you a little claim check. You haven't loaned them your coat. It's your coat. The claim check just identifies that the coat belongs to you. And then you give the claim check to the gal or guy and they find your coat. That that's what tokenized gold is. It's a claim.

>> And the token is a the token is a is a is the token is a claim to the gold. However you want to call it. The token is not the gold. The token is the claim.

>> No, it's proof that you own the gold. It's your gold. That's just, you know.

>> So the distinction here that you guys are making, the distinction you guys are making, so I can just park your car. Have you loaned your car to the valet? When you park your car and they give you a clean

>> Many many times valet has taken off with the car. Things have happened to the car. Let me just ask this, guys. The point that we're talking about here from different perspectives, it sounds like, is the distinction between debt and a claim on equity. Is that a fair representation of how you say it?

>> 100%.

>> Peter, does that sound right to you? Because that's essentially what it sounds like you're saying. Hey, this is a claim on something owned rather than a claim on something owed.

>> Well, tokenized gold is a claim on what you own. It's not you're not unlike a bank deposit. If I put my money in a bank and I'm a depositor, yes, I'm a liability. The bank owes me the money. I loaned my money to the bank. But if I put my gold in a safety deposit box at the bank, I haven't loaned the bank anything. The bank I I rented a storage facility and I stuck my gold in a vault and they gave me a key. The key, you know, and so I own the gold. It's mine. I never loaned it to the bank. It's not a property of the bank. Uh, so, you know, if you have a tokenized gold, if the company that tokenized it goes bankrupt, you you still have your gold. It's not it's not their asset. It's not on their balance sheet. It's

>> We we understand that, Peter, but the but the point still remains and we can get into the semantics of it and and and you're right, you know, from legal perspectives, it's different, right? If they go bankrupt or something like that, but at the end of the day, that certificate of my car at the valet means they need to give me my car when I present that back to them. So the token means they have to give me the gold. The problem is though, at the end of the day, is that it's not in my custody.

>> And so what happens is when it's not in my custody, they have control over the asset. And so what we've seen again, we going to go back through every period of history and you know them better than I do. You've been talking about it for 20 years. Uh all the times that the banks have decided not to allow you to get your assets back out. And when we start talking about physical property, you mentioned like I can take it to a vault in Switzerland or Singapore, but not if they won't allow you to ship it, not if the country won't allow you to receive it or send it in, right? And and and that's not far-fetched because over the last hundred years, it's what we've seen over and over and over again. And it's always going to be the problem when we have a physical asset. I have to trust somebody. I have to trust they have what they say they have. I have to trust they don't have more than they say they have. I have to trust that they'll allow me to access it or use it whenever I want. And we can get into the legal claims, but as long as I don't have possession of it, I I have no control over it.

>> But your solution to that is, okay, let's just take nothing and pretend it's something. And like and because because I can send Bitcoin without having to trust because I can have Bitcoin in my own wallet. I don't need an exchange. I don't need an ETF. I can hold Bitcoin and I can send it to somebody else who's not on an exchange, who has their own wallet. Because we can transact between each other without that, then we're going to accept Bitcoin. But I would rather have real asset. I would rather have real money and just do my homework and and just, you know, who I trust to hold it. I mean, I can store some of it myself. I could use respectable, reliable third parties to hold some of it, who are audited, who care about their reputations, uh, and and don't want to rip off their their customers because they have a brand. You know, Brinks, for example, has been around for 150, 160 years. They've been storing gold. They've never lost an ounce. Nobody who's ever entrusted their gold to Brinks to hold it has ever lost any. And why is that? Because they have a brand. They have a reputation. I'm sure along the way somebody robbed Brinks. I'm sure they lost some gold, but they made good on it. They didn't let their customers lose any gold. And of course, they probably have insurance as well, so big companies can get insurance from Lloyd's and other companies, so you can insure it against loss, against theft.

>> Yeah. I would I would like to point out just quickly though that Peter's right about most of that, but it's also just a very American viewpoint. America's 4% of the world's population. 4% of the world's population. Unfortunately, most of the world lives in um double to triple-digit inflationary and in a lot of very authoritarian regimes where they don't have the ability to just ship gold around the world. They don't have the ability to even have money. For example, I can't send money to a woman in Afghanistan that might need it or in North Korea. They can't even have it. In addition to that, you have 25% of the world's adults, not the population, the world's adults, 25% who don't have access to the financial system because they don't have permission to join.

>> Tokenized gold is perfect for them.

>> So when Peter's talk, well, it's not Peter because um Tether and US stablecoins are are already blacklisted from OFAC non-compliant addresses. Um transactions are frozen and and pulled back all the time because they're centralized accounts. And so from an American viewpoint, like sure, just own gold in the vault and sit my mai on the top of the World Trade Center or whatever, but like when you're in North Korea, Afghanistan, when you're the other 96% of the world, it just doesn't work like that. And so again, from a US standpoint, sure, that makes sense. But from a global standpoint, especially thinking about the future, you have to realize that the points that you made, while valid, they don't really apply to the most the majority of the world.

>> Yeah. Well, then why is most why is most of the Bitcoin here in America held by Americans if it's if it's if it's so valuable in the rest of the world? Why does how come Americans have most of it?

>> Well, obviously the United States has most of the GDP. So, we already know where most of the financial center of the world is. But we can see that adoption around the world has been growing dramatically. And of course, we're always going to keep coming back to we're 16 years versus 5,000 years. And so, we're looking at a at a growing asset for sure. The needs those needs are better served by stablecoins or tokenized gold than they are by Bitcoin.

>> Yeah.

>> Let's jump in and talk about that just because I want I want to hit something here. Peter has been, you know, very critical of the value proposition of Bitcoin. Mark, could you take that one head-on in your view? Where do you see the value proposition of Bitcoin? Explain it from a first-principal standpoint as you see it so we can get that on the table and maybe have Peter address those remarks.

>> Yeah, I'd love to address that one because again, this is something I learned from Peter. Uh I mean, I got I got into Austrian economics because of Peter and so I see this like contradiction in what he says where he talks about, you know, it has to be physical for it to have any value because of course, as he says, gold, you can make cufflinks out of. But the thing that I don't understand is that, you know, Mises, Hayek, Menger, the foundational principle of Austrian economics is that all value is subjective. That's it. So humans assign value based on their own preferences and Those preferences are typically around things that serve their own needs. So, for example, last night after dinner, I dumped my water out. I didn't need that water. But if I was dying on a deserted island, I would give every penny I had for that water. So, it's based off my preferences that serve my own needs. And that's Peter's framework. That's an Austrian framework. So when you say that Bitcoin has no value, sure, maybe no value to you, but you're also violating the first principle.

>> Millions of people.

>> Millions of people have subjectively decided that Bitcoin does have value. Yeah, I think

>> They are using it to store wealth. They are using it to transact across borders. They're using it for ways that there is no other use case to achieve what they're doing other than Bitcoin. And so again, you know, you can say that you disagree with the valuation of it, but I don't think that you can say it has no value without abandoning the subjective value framework.

>> Yeah, I think you're you've got the concept a bit wrong. Um, value is subjective in that some people could value something more than others and it also depends on the circumstance. I mean, water, there's we can't dispute that water has value, right? Without water, we're going to die. So, water has value, but it has more value to somebody dying of thirst in a desert than it might have to somebody who's got plenty of water around. Um, and and and look, yes,

>> You're making my case. To to no to a vegetarian, a a a nice filet mignon doesn't have any value because they're not going to eat it.

>> Uh but to somebody who eats meat, it has value. But you can objectively recognize even if you're a vegetarian and you know that that, you know, steak has no value to you because you don't eat meat. You recognize it has value. And I don't have to smoke cigarettes to know that cigarettes have value because I know that there are a lot of people who smoke them. Even though if I had a bunch of cigarettes, I wouldn't do anything with them because I don't smoke them. But I know other people do. So I know there's some value there. So that part is not, you know, that is objective. There is actual value there. Bitcoin has zero value whatsoever. You can't do anything with the Bitcoin. Yes, I can give it to you and you could give it to me and we could trade it back and forth. But if I was stuck with my Bitcoin, if I was on a desert island and all I had was Bitcoin, how would that make my life any better? What could I do with that Bitcoin? Absolutely nothing. And I don't say that things have to be physical to have value.

>> Well, if you were on a desert island with your gold, what are you going to do?

>> Have value. Music. I can listen to music and that has value. It entertains me. It's not I can't touch it. I just hear it. You know, software. I use, you know, intangible things all the time. It's not the fact that Bitcoin isn't physical that makes it worthless. It's that it doesn't do anything. It doesn't solve any needs. Any and there's anybody else can come up with a a a cryptocurrency. Bitcoin was invented by Satoshi, whoever the hell that is. But there's nothing that stops anybody else from creating something identical to Bitcoin in every way except it might be better than Bitcoin. It might be faster. It might be cheaper, but it can be the exact same thing. You have 21 million of them. You can have the exact same. You can make it more scarce. You can have only 10 million of them, whatever. But you can have a scarce supply that you create and you could let people trade it. It could be on the same type of blockchain. There's no there there's an unlimited there's there's an infinite amount of of cryptocurrencies that could be created that can do everything that Bitcoin can do. That's not true with gold. Gold was created by the Big Bang. No gold has been created that didn't exist 5 billion years ago. There's no way to make more gold. Whatever gold was made in the Big Bang, that's the gold we got. And most of it is scattered around the universe. There's not that much of it here on planet Earth. And gold has qualities about it that you can't replicate. Yes, for some jobs you don't need gold. You can use silver, you could use copper, you could use other metals, but there are some things where you need gold where there is no substitute and gold is what you need. That's not true for Bitcoin. I mean, there's plenty of substitial gold. There are some things for which there's no substitute for industrial gold. It's not

>> Where people need it. Yes, you have to buy gold. You need it. And there are there are new use cases for gold discovered all the time. I'm sure a 100 years from now, a thousand years from now, humans will find even more uses for gold, even better ways to use it. And when I store my gold right now, I'm storing my gold to be used in the future. In the meantime, look, I'm wearing it. I got a gold bracelet. I got a gold ring. Got a gold watch, right? I I'm using my the gold, but all the gold that I'm wearing, all that value is going to be stored and it can be used in the future for whatever humans discover gold can be used for.

>> I would Bitcoin is not it can't be used for anything now. It won't be used for anything in the future. In the future, people won't even know what Bitcoin is unless they learned about it, you know, studying history.

>> I'd be I'd be deeply disappointed if Peter Schiff had a stainless steel watch band. [laughter] Mark,

>> It's the it's the only gold he owns, his watch. But uh, anyway, let's

>> I have a little bit more.

>> Let me let me let me address some of these things. So, I think I think what Peter's trying to say is he he he's not trying to make the distinction, if I'm correct, Peter, of tangible versus intangible assets. You do believe there is value in intangible assets. You just don't see it in Bitcoin. And ultimately, I think what you're saying is that you don't see any utility. So, as you said, you do see value in intangible assets like music because you can listen to the music, right? So in so I think what you're really saying is that you do believe there's value in intangible assets. Obviously you have to because that'd be ridiculous otherwise the software is worth trillions of dollars, right? So you do believe there's value in intangible assets. What you're saying is you don't see the utility in it. And so

>> As it applies to Bitcoin, I don't see anything unique in

>> I want to I'm going to address that. So but I just want to make the case that first of all, uh, you don't see the utility and that's fine. I don't like you know, I maybe don't like to listen to music or your type of music. That's fine. Uh, but the fact that you don't see the utility doesn't mean there's not. So, for example, right, like gold was also a rock until people decided it was money. The internet was nothing until people connected, you know, the world. But but Bitcoin is a decentralized settlement network that's been running now for 17 years without without a single minute of downtime. It's processed trillions of dollars of value. It's attracted the largest asset managers in the world. And you can't call that nothing. And furthermore, like I said, if we think about just the value of it, right? So or I should say the utility value. So, as I said, right, uh, you said it doesn't solve any problem. I might say that, well, we would both agree, I would imagine, that value is created by solving problems. And so, if you look and and the bigger the problem you solve, the more value has been created. And if you look at probably the oldest problem in humanity, how do I store my wealth in a way that doesn't get stolen? And humans have tried to solve that problem from day uh from day one. So you and I come together, we make a village, we make a city, we make a kingdom, we make a country to protect private property rights. Um, and if I have a little bit of gold, maybe I put it in my sock drawer. If I have more gold, I bury it in the desert. If I have more gold, I have to go get a vault and I have to spend a lot of money to move it around. But Bitcoin allows me to protect my property with just a cryptographic key that in a way that can't property can't be stolen. And it's and it also allows me to own that property with property rights that can't be violated. Unlike with gold, where as I said before, people could stop block prevent that transaction or the or the shipment or the settlement of that gold. But my property rights can't be violated. And that may not be important to an American, but it's super important to a North Korean and it's super important to a woman in Afghanistan. And so I'm going to explain to you why it's different than the other ones. And I know

>> But no, explain to me if I own gold, how how are my if I let's forget about tokenized gold, I have gold on in my in my house somewhere hidden in my house, I own it, it's mine, it's I have the gold. How how do my property rights to that gold get violated?

>> It gets violated when you can't use your property rights properly. So, for example, uh, it's not an antidote story, but maybe it is. Like the lady that cuts my hair is from Afghanistan. Her family moved over when she was young and she's like, "Man, I wish I could help some of these ladies and my my mother's friends in Afghanistan, but I can't send them money because the Taliban controls the bank and I have no way to send them. So, how do I send my gold to help those women in Afghanistan?" Peter and and obviously it's impossible. So So then when my when my property rights become impaired

>> That violates my property rights.

>> Right? So

>> But I haven't lost my property. You're just saying now obviously if it's a gold coin, I can put it in an envelope and I can mail it.

>> Mail it to Afghanistan.

>> Well, I mean, come on, Peter. I don't know, right? And I mean, you Nomi Parks, who's famous for going around talking about how she escaped North Korea and if she had only $50, she could have saved herself from having to be sold into sexual slavery and how she had to swim eight hours across the Hong Kong Bay. Like those people need money.

>> Yeah. Well, in North Korea, they go through their house looking for their money on a regular basis, gold or whatever that might be. I haven't lost my property just because I can't get it to Afghanistan, you know. If they they if they impair your right to use your property, it's impaired. Now, I want I'm going to address why you can't use Tether Gold in a second here, but

>> If I could just finish this, then I'm going to address the question about why you can't send Tether Gold over there. Uh, but so there are people, and again, I understand Americans don't understand the utility because they just don't live in these other parts of the world. But we do understand that in Argentina or in, like I said, in North Korea, we do understand that there's dissident and journalists that have to use Bitcoin because their government has froze their accounts. Like I said, 25% of the adults in the world can't use the banking system for any number of reasons. We can see that Lightning Network instant cross-border settlement times have been accelerating at a rapid rate. And beyond the humanitarian use cases of it, again, right, it's the first natively digital bearer asset. The first, the only a settlement network that operates 24/7 and $10 billion have moved across it. Now, that has utility. It has massive life-saving demand and the value shows that. And I'll just I'm going to add just one more piece and I'll stop.

>> How do you know how do you know what that's worth? And how do you know, you know, what might be there competing with what a market is that might do the job better?

>> Isn't Isn't that what a market I'm going to I'm going to address that. I'm going to address that one first. But, uh, how do I know what it's worth? I think the market tells us that every day. It's the only market that trades 24/7. But,

>> But the market the price can change very rapidly. What if

>> Sort of sort of like the couple guys that meet every morning in London to set the gold price in a closed room? Sort of like that. No, Bitcoin's price is 24/7 set global. Let's

answer the question of why not let let me ask the question of why not the other 19 and a half million cryptocurrencies and certainly why not gold tokens. Um, so you have to understand a little bit of technology. I'm going to try to keep this super simple, but Bitcoin is a decentralized network. So instead of having one database, and every database has been hacked now, Experian's been hacked, even the NSA was hacked, right? Every database gets hacked. Instead of having one database, we have 100,000. We have a million databases. And then we have the million databases that are all distributed that have to achieve consensus. And then we have the mining, the hash power that provides the hash power to secure that network. What happened is Bitcoin was created in this wrinkle of time that nobody really understood what it was. And it was allowed to grow for about a decade before people figured out how much value there was. And by the time they tried to attack the network, the network was too big. Many people have tried to duplicate a decent, a truly decentralized network similar to Bitcoin, and they get hacked because you have to tell people about it so people use it, and then as soon as people find out about it, they hack it. And the reason why certainly Tether Gold won't ever work, and nor will any stablecoin ever work, is because stablecoins are nowhere even close to being decentralized because, of course, in order to get the stablecoin dollar or the token of gold, I have to trust a central custodian to give me the token. So inherently, it's centralized. And what happens, and this is already happening, the US Treasury is demanding that stablecoins do not go to blacklisted wallets and addresses.

"Do you have any kind of health insurance?"

"Yes, of course."

"Why? You have to trust a third party. Why do you have health insurance?"

"Sure. There's lots of things that I trust third parties on."

"So, why can't you trust them to hold your gold?"

"Well, I mean, you certainly can. And you can just find case after case after case, every single case in history, how that trust gets violated."

"Well, but there's plenty of examples where it's not violated. It's violated by governments. It's not violated by private companies, private individuals."

"So then you can guarantee that governments will never ever violate it ever again?"

"Governments are going to wake up one day and live on a budget and give us all our freedoms back."

"Outlaw Bitcoin. They can make people have Bitcoin."

"Well, they they can't."

"Of course they can."

"So..."

"They can outlaw whatever they want."

"We can talk about that, but I want to pose something different. I'm going to let me see if I can shift this direction a little bit because Ash, you started out by asking a question about the future. And Peter wants to keep talking about the past, but let's just address this, Peter. So, one of the fastest-growing areas, obviously, is AI. AI agents are growing at a rapid rate. McKenzie says by 2030, which is four years from now, agent-to-agent commerce will be over $5 trillion. Agents need to do sub-cent transactions thousands of times a day at a rapid rate. But they also have to do that autonomously. They have to do it permissionlessly. They have to do it without borders, and they have to have final settlement. And there is no other option for them to use."

"It's not fantasy. It's happening today. As I said, McKenzie, I mean, they're somewhat reputable. Maybe I don't like them, but whatever. $5 trillion just in the next four years alone. And agents will need a fiat, the fiat system will not work for them. You can't send a transaction for less than 35 cents. And neither will a stablecoin or tokenized gold. And we can get into all the reasons why, but specifically tokenized gold for sure, because agents aren't able to turn into a person and go audit gold in a vault somewhere. So they need to have final settlement. They're waiting. They're doing thousands of transactions in milliseconds. They need..."

"...fantasy to somehow try to weave Bitcoin into the fabric of AI. I think the two have absolutely nothing."

"Well, they have everything to do together, and I'll prove it. So, let me give you one will be what cracks the blockchain and just blows the whole thing up if it hasn't imploded on its own by then."

"Okay. Well, you know, I understand that we're talking about the future, and the future is hard to understand, but let me just give you some concrete proof here. So when the internet was built, in the original, in the initial protocol, I'm sure you've seen like the errors that you get, a 404 error or something like that. Well, inside of the original protocol stack, they built a protocol for internet-native payments. It was built in from the beginning of the internet."

"And what works in that protocol right now is Bitcoin going through the Lightning Network, and no nothing else will solve that use case. And you can say, and that's fine. You can say that AI agents is never going to happen."

"No, no, I'm not anti-AI. You know, I there's a lot of promise there. I just don't think..."

"And so the point is, is that we can keep going back to the past, and we can keep trying to make a better version of what worked in the past, but it will always fail for the exact same reason that humans are required for us to trust them, and humans have a way to manipulate things, and governments have a tendency to want to try to take more than they've consumed or earned. And..."

"...and look, Bitcoin of the past, you know, they've had plenty of Ponzi schemes and pyramids and chain letters in the past. So there's nothing new about doing it with Bitcoin. And you know, if Bitcoin, if it was really being adopted in this major way, you know, why over the last five years? If you go back to the peak of Bitcoin, forget about in terms of gold, just in US dollars, Bitcoin hit $69,000 in November of '21. It's a little bit lower than that right now. So despite all this massive promotion, because back in 2021, this is before there were any ETFs, before Donald Trump was the Bitcoin president, before we had a Bitcoin strategic reserve, before we had MicroStrategy and all these copycat Bitcoin treasury companies, Bitcoin was actually higher than it is right now. So how is that? All this new buying, all this adoption, and the price has gone down when the price of everything else has gone up?"

"Yeah. So, of course, Peter doesn't want to address the future and AI agents, but let's go back and talk about the price. We can talk about that as well. Um, and of course, I'll concede with you that as of right now today, Bitcoin is about roughly the same price it was in its 2021 peak. Um, but I think any financial analyst that wants to be at least a little bit accurate or honest would understand that Bitcoin moves in these four-year cycles. And so, of course, trying to measure the bottom of a cycle to the top of the cycle is a little bit dishonest if you don't at least explain that. But let me break it down a little bit further, because this is a fact that Peter doesn't want to admit, and I'd love to see what he says about this. Um, because we talk about a 5,000-year track record, store of value, and how much it buys a hundred years later, all those things. But let's just zoom in on the history. Because I remember gold hitting $800 an ounce in 1980. And you know when it the next time it hit $800? 2008. 28 years of holding an asset that went nowhere. Actually, it went down in real terms for 28 years. Nearly three decades destroyed purchasing power. Now imagine telling a generation of investors, 'Oh, just wait 30, 30 years, and it's going to be fine.' Now, Bitcoin has drawdowns. Of course, it's a new asset that's finding its place in the market. It's had 80% drawdowns. You're absolutely right. But Bitcoin's recovery cycles are measured in years, not decades. So, you want to talk about drawdowns? Gold's bear market lasted longer than Bitcoin's even existed."

"Yeah, but we don't know. Just because Bitcoin recovered, you know, over the past 15 years from a big decline, we have no idea that if it's ever going to recover again. You don't know what where the price of Bitcoin is going to be in the future. Bitcoin can go to $20,000 by the end of the year. It can drop to $10,000, and it can drop to $5,000. I mean, there's no way to know where the bottom is, how long it's going to fall, and there's no guarantee it's ever going to come back to the current price where it is now."

"You're right. Tomorrow's not guaranteed for any of us."

"Never come back near this."

"You're absolutely right, Peter. Tomorrow's not guaranteed for any of us. And the same could be true about gold, right? All demand is speculative. Every asset is held based on its future expectations. So the question is always whether those expectations are rational. And obviously, institutional investors, sovereign nations, and the world's largest asset managers have all concluded that Bitcoin's mining properties fully justify the allocation."

"What happened with gold when it went to $800? That was 10 years after it was $35. So gold went from $35 to $800. And then, yes, after getting to that level of overvaluation, it did lose value. If you bought it at $800, and yes, you could have bought stocks, you could have bought bonds. You know, back in 1980, you could have bought Treasuries with a 14% yield. That was a pretty good deal. You could have bought the Dow Jones, you know, with like a 6-7% dividend yield. So stocks were cheap. You know, the Dow Jones was worth one ounce of gold. It's worth 10 ounces of gold today. Now, of course, it was worth 40 ounces of gold 25 years ago. So now we're in a bear market, but yeah, gold was expensive in 1980, and assets were cheap. But gold has a long, long history that you could rely on. Bitcoin doesn't. There is no history that you can rely on."

"And that's the whole argument, Ash. That's the whole, that's the only argument. And of course, there is not the only argument. There is no one argument. You can't go back and say Bitcoin has a history of doing anything. It doesn't have a history. It hasn't been around long enough. For most of Bitcoin's existence, nobody knew about it. Nobody owned it. And the people who owned it had a small amount of money in it."

"Bitcoin really came on the scene over the last three or four years. And during that period of time, the people who bought it haven't made any money. You know, they came on the scene three or four years."

"Peter, you've been tweeting about Bitcoin way longer than three or four years."

"All right, guys. Let me just jump in here, and I want to come back to one of the central tenets of this debate, which is the question about being a potential reserve asset. I want to get you guys focused here a little bit on the future and talk a little bit about the financial system, the global monetary system. Do you foresee any changes? And according to this thesis of this debate, the opening question, do you see any potential changes to reserve asset status for either gold or Bitcoin?"

"Yeah, for well, I absolutely. I think that gold is now, in fact, the largest asset central banks own. It's now greater than US Treasuries. And I think the trend out of dollars into gold is going to continue. The primary drivers that took gold from $2,000 to over $5,000 were foreign central banks. I don't think we got to see more private sector participation. Certainly out of the West, you know, Americans were major sellers of gold for years as the price of gold was going up. Americans were selling into it. The central banks kept buying it. And I think the central banks that were buying gold are going to keep buying it. I think the central banks that haven't bought gold are going to start buying it. And what's interesting is that none of these central banks have been buying Bitcoin. They certainly have known about Bitcoin. They've had the opportunity to buy Bitcoin, but they don't want to buy it. They don't want to have anything to do with it. Their only thing they're buying as a reserve replacement for the dollar is gold."

"Mark, over to you."

"Yeah, I mean, a couple things I just want to add. So, first of all, he talked about how the central bank's portion of gold they hold on their balance sheets has now swelled and a lot of them more than what they have in US Treasuries. Um, and most of that growth has really come in about the last year and a half or so. And it's because not because of how much they've been buying as much as how much the price has gone from $2,000 to $5,000. Um, I do want to say though, if we sort of like peel back and understand what's going on here, because you're asking about the future, where things are going. Um, you know, Peter said earlier that the reason why gold wasn't working, and you know, for that three decades of loss wasn't, you know, the inflation was destroyed. He talks about gold being a good inflation hedge. Um, but what's interesting is if you look back, gold reached $2,000 an ounce in 2020. And it took, and so from 2020, '21, '22, '23, '24, from 2020 to '24, we saw the largest amounts of government stimulus that has ever been pumped into an economy. More inflation than we've ever seen. We saw record high CPI of 9%. And for four years, gold went nowhere. Gold was still $2,000 an ounce when you got to 2024. So it obviously didn't respond to the biggest amount of stimulus we ever had or the highest inflation we had in decades. So I'm not sure what it's moving to."

"Well, I'll give you an answer. What I think it's moving to. What it's moving to is not inflation. It's... This is important to understand my case of where we're going in the future."

"Gold obviously didn't move to stimulus and inflation. What it moved to is political instability. What's happening right now with the US seizing Russia's bank accounts after the invasion of Ukraine, the BRICS trying to do their own currency, China's doing their own gold settlement out of Hong Kong. And we have this political instability that's happening right now. And people are realizing, 'Oh shoot, there is a trust problem. I can't trust the banking system. If Russia can have their bank account seized, what hope do I have?' And so the world is trying to figure something out. They're moving to gold not as protection from more inflation. They're moving to gold so they don't have treasuries that can get frozen or seized. And that's a key. Let me take this to this conclusion, because that's a key piece. The inflation didn't move the gold. It's the political instability. And they're moving because of a loss of trust. And so if you take that to its conclusion, you'll realize that for global trade to continue, if we're going to continue to globally trade in a world where trust is lost, because trust is getting degraded and it doesn't get built back up, the only way to move forward to continue to trade in a world without trust is to have a global settlement layer that's trustless in a neutral reserve asset. Gold was a neutral reserve asset. We need a neutral reserve asset, and we need a neutral settlement layer that could move at the speed of light. That's what the world's going to need to move forward. And if it's not Bitcoin, then I would say, what is it?"

"Well, first of all, tokenized gold can move faster and cheaper than Bitcoin. So there you go."

"Sure. But we said with a loss of trust, Peter, a loss of trust."

"Yeah, a lot less trust in trusting that people will believe that nothing is something. But I want to talk about what makes gold move because you seem to expect that there should be an immediate reaction. The Fed prints money and gold should immediately rise because..."

"I mean, four years, but not immediately. So gold started the 21st century below $300, and now it's above $4,000. Why did it move up that much? It was because this century has been the century of excess deficit spending and money printing and quantitative easing, and a lot of the movement in gold. When gold was at $2,000, it's because gold investors already anticipated the monetary policies that followed, and gold got ahead of the curve. And so then it waited for a while and then made another move. It's not like you know it's going to happen like that directly. But the ultimately the forces that are powering gold is the debasement of the money, because gold actually doesn't change. An ounce of gold is an ounce of gold. It doesn't change. What changes is how many dollars you need to buy that ounce of gold. And if we keep creating new dollars, then you need more and more. And the markets eventually will be forward-looking. The markets are going to start to think, we've got almost a $40 trillion national debt. It'll probably be $50 trillion by the time Trump leaves office three years from now. We'll have a $50 trillion national debt. And then how long before it doubles again to $100 trillion? Probably not that long. And the gold is going to start soaring in anticipation of all the inflation that is going to be created to monetize that debt. They don't have to wait for the central banks to do it. Investors will react in anticipation of what it's obvious that the central bank bankers will do. The market will be forward-looking. Uh, and so, you know, you can't just like look, oh, in 2020 we did this..."

"Not 2020, four years. Four years. And during that time, during that time, Bitcoin went up 800%."

"But let me go back and address one last thing that you..."

"Went up for totally different reasons than gold went up. And I'm not arguing that Bitcoin wasn't a huge success for the people who got in early and promoted it. It was a massive success for those people. It was a huge marketing success. There's a lot of people now around the world that have been suckered into this con, and that has enabled a lot of people, many of them my good friends, who are now worth hundreds of millions of dollars because they got into Bitcoin early, and they have been selling it to the people who have been buying over."

"You've been saying that since Bitcoin was $1,000, and at some point you'll be right, but you're not. But let me go back and address, and we can go through all your track record. I have that pulled up. We could we can go through that if you want. But let me address Ash's question because the question that he asked, I was trying to get to is, do we think that Bitcoin will actually make it into like nation's reserves or central bank reserves? I think that's the question that Ash is asking. And so if I answer that, what I was trying to say is that the world is breaking apart. We have a loss of trust. And I believe that instead of having like one where the whole world gets together and declares one new reserve asset, I believe we'll start to have sort of different assets that are held in reserve. And so multiple currencies or bonds, and obviously gold is there as well. We're also seeing nations starting to hold minerals in the ground. So they're saying, 'Hey, I'll just hold the lithium mines, the copper mines, etc.' Um, but I do believe that Bitcoin will have a meaningful allocation in central bank reserves. Um, let's call it in the next 20 years, right? We're talking about the future here, and we can already see this. It's already happening. So, for example, let me I'm going to tell you, in the United States, we hold somewhere over 200,000, maybe 300,000. Trump has called for a strategic Bitcoin reserve, which hasn't been launched and kicked off yet. I agree. El Salvador has had their national Bitcoin reserve going for some time. Brazil has a bill in with the Chamber of Deputies right now to establish a sovereign strategic reserve. Pakistan announced a plan for a strategic reserve. Russia has one. Argentina, Brazil, Hong Kong, Japan has one. The Czech National Bank submitted a proposal to..."

"These are all bills that have been submitted. Go ahead and check it."

"Okay. You're talking about proposals."

"This is all happening over the last six months or year."

"Yeah."

"I understand. And the Bitcoin community has done a very good job of bribing politicians into advancing this type of legislation. And it was particularly successful in the US with the 2024 election of Trump, the Bitcoin lobby."

"Whatever you want to give the story, you can't deny the fact. We have 15 US states that have adopted it as well. So you can tell us the story as to why it happened. But Ash asked a question if they'll have it in reserves, and I just gave the facts that it is."

"It's political pandering to a special interest group. People who own Bitcoin want the price of their Bitcoin to go up. And so when a politician promises to buy Bitcoin, to take taxpayer money and buy Bitcoin, and you already own Bitcoin, you're like, 'Yeah, I'm voting for that guy because he's going to make my Bitcoin go up. He's going to give me a government-funded bailout so I can sell my Bitcoin at a higher price.' It's all political pressure. Uh, that is some countries. Well, I don't agree with that. Let's run that. When the price of Bitcoin collapses, all the political firepower is going to go away."

"Let's let's run with that, Peter. While I don't agree and the facts obviously say differently, Sweden, Japan, these are the facts."

"But let's let's let's play this out. So, let's play this out. So what you're saying, Peter, I don't really agree, but I'm going to play along with this because what you're saying is that there are so many people, the adoption of Bitcoin is so massive that they institute, they represent one of the biggest voting blocks that politicians are forced to bow down and pander to the largest, most powerful voting block because Bitcoin has so much adoption. That's what you're saying. Let me explain it."

"So I'll agree with you, Peter. The biggest donors in the 2024 election came from crypto. They were number one donors, right? Especially to the Trump campaign."

"More than banking, more than pharmaceuticals, more than..."

"As a matter of fact, yes, they were number one. Now, as far as voters are concerned, the crypto voters, and there's a lot of Americans that own crypto. I mean, they're not necessarily the biggest voting block, but they were a one-issue voting block. So all you have to do is come out and say, 'I'm pro-Bitcoin,' and you got the vote of a lot of people that own Bitcoin because they didn't care about anything else. If you were pro-Bitcoin, you got their vote. But if you didn't own Bitcoin, you didn't care. So being pro-Bitcoin, you didn't lose any votes because the people that didn't own it didn't even pay attention. But the people who owned it, you got their vote. So from a political perspective, pandering to the Bitcoin vote made a lot of sense. And that's why it happened, and that's why you have this. But as more people lose money in Bitcoin, and more people are probably losing money in Bitcoin than are making money, they're still hoping they're going to make money because they believe all the nonsense by guys like Michael Saylor that it's going to the moon. But when Bitcoin collapses instead back down to earth, and a lot of people lose money, you know, they're that political push is going to die out, and now you're going to start to see politicians trying to hold people accountable."

"Well, well, Ash, to answer your question, I'll concede to Peter. Maybe that's why they were bowing down to the most powerful voting block. So we'll concede to Peter, that's why. But the fact is, as I said, Switzerland, Japan, we have all these countries already doing it. 15 states in the US. They have all started paperwork and voting to bring on strategic Bitcoin reserves."

"Okay. But they haven't actually done it."

"Well, give it time, Peter. Give it give it give it time. But to answer your question, may be passed."

"The facts are, yes, many, many nations already have. There's a dozen or more that are in the process of, and 15 states have already passed it as legislation. And if, and let's just agree, Peter's right. They had to bow down because the Bitcoin base was so strong and powerful. But the fact is, is that they are doing it based off the initiatives that we have in place. It's going to continue. And so anyway, to answer your question, Ash, yes, certainly they will be holding on reserves in the future. But meanwhile, the central banks that have been buying gold, the major central banks that have been buying gold, have not been buying Bitcoin. They certainly could have bought Bitcoin, I guess, if they wanted to, but they didn't."

"You're on mute, Ash. We don't hear you."

"Who's on mute?"

"Ash, I don't hear him."

"Hold on. Does that fix it? Can you guys hear me?"

"Now we can. Yeah."

"There we go. Listen, if you tuned in for a spirited debate tonight, you were not disappointed. I want to give you guys each a chance to give some final thoughts and key takeaways. But first, before we do that, any other topics that either of you feel strongly about that you want to get in before we wrap this conversation?"

"I mean, a topic that has nothing to do with Bitcoin or gold?"

"A topic around Bitcoin or gold, an aspect that we haven't yet touched on. I we've covered a lot of ground. I think we've sort of hit all the bases. Um, so, not necessarily. Well, we sure have covered a lot of ground here tonight. I think we've taken this from a lot of different angles. It's been great to have you both on. I want to give you each a chance to make a final statement here. Peter, why don't you go first, and we'll give the last word to we'll give the last word to Mark."

"Yeah. Well, you know, I think people need to understand the fundamental difference between Bitcoin and gold because I don't think Bitcoin is digital gold. It has nothing in common with gold. It doesn't trade like gold. If anything, it's inversely correlated with gold at best. So maybe it's anti-gold, but you know, it's no more digital gold than an image of a hamburger is digital food, right? You can't eat a picture of a hamburger, but you it could look like a hamburger, you know, represented. And so that's really what Bitcoin is. It's just a picture of a gold coin. But Bitcoin itself doesn't have any of the properties of gold. So if you want digital gold, then that's there. You can have tokenized gold. You can own your gold, physical gold, but have a digital representation of that ownership. So something like Tether Gold is digital gold. You know, I've got something at Shift Gold right now. I call it T-Gold, and you can open up an account at T-Gold. And right now, it's just storage. We store the gold for you, gold and silver. But eventually, I'm going to turn it into a payments network where people can be paid and receive payments in gold, and they can ultimately take delivery in a token. And so I think that that's digital gold. Bitcoin is a whole different animal. I mean, I look at it as like a collectible digital token. There are people who want to collect Bitcoin. There are more Bitcoin collectors today than there were 10, 15 years ago. And the Bitcoin collections are now more valuable because more people want to buy Bitcoin to add to their collection. And the reason that people collect Bitcoin and buy Bitcoin is because they think they're going to get rich. They believe that the Bitcoin that they're buying today, they'll be able to sell it in the future to another collector who's going to pay a lot more money. And that collector is only going to buy Bitcoin if he has the same view that in the future there'll be another collector who will pay even more money for the Bitcoin that he bought. And that greater fool theory has been around for a long, long time. It didn't start with Bitcoin, and it's probably not going to end with Bitcoin. And you know, a lot of people did make money in Bitcoin if they got in early, if they got in on the ground floor. But the people who are buying now, who have been convinced that they're still early, that they're still getting in on the ground floor. Everybody knows about Bitcoin. I go to Bitcoin conferences now. They're mobbed. There's tens of thousands of people at every Bitcoin conference I go to, versus hundreds at a gold conference. Everybody is enthusiastic. Everybody thinks they can't lose, that we're going to the moon. This is a mania. This is popular delusions of madness of crowds. You got to sell into that if you're in Bitcoin. You've got to recognize that the money has already been made, the big money. And even if Bitcoin manages to make another new high, it's not worth the downside risk. There are plenty of other things that you can invest in that have a lot more upside potential than Bitcoin and a lot less downside risk. Not just gold and silver. I think gold and silver mining stocks are particularly attractive right now. If you want to try to make 10 times your money, I think you got a much better chance of doing it in the mining stocks than you do in Bitcoin. And I think there's less downside risk there. You've got real businesses that are generating real profits, paying dividends. I think the profits are going to go up, the dividends are going to go up. You know, I hear Michael Saylor all the time now. He no longer really compares Bitcoin to gold. He compares it to Manhattan real estate. He says Manhattan real estate is scarce, and Bitcoin is scarce. So Bitcoin is valuable just like Manhattan real estate. But what he doesn't understand, it's not the scarcity that gives Manhattan real estate its value. It's the fact that the scarcity allows the owners of that real estate to charge high rents. So if you own Manhattan real estate, you can get a lot of rent from your tenants, whether they're residential or commercial, you get a lot of money per square foot. You own Bitcoin, you get nothing. You get no rent. You collect absolutely nothing. Doesn't matter how much Bitcoin you have, you're not going to get anything for it. It's not like Manhattan real estate. It's not like gold. It's a lot like tulips, except it's not a flower and it doesn't have a nice smell. So it's more of a digital tulip than it is a digital gold. And you know, if you want to speculate on a Bitcoin collection, I mean, look, people buy lottery tickets, people bet on sports. I mean, I'm not going to say you can't throw a little money at Bitcoin and take your chances, but you have to get out before the music stops because Bitcoin is a transfer of wealth from the people who buy it to the people who sell it. No wealth has been created in crypto. It's just money moving around. The people who sell it get rich because other people bought it. There's no real wealth being generated, no productivity associated with it. It's just a pyramid, a negative sum game because there's a lot of friction in there. The miners get their cut, the exchanges. So there's a lot of dead loss. So it's not even zero-sum. It's a negative-sum. But make sure you just have a small amount in there that you can afford to lose. But it shouldn't be in an investment portfolio. I think it's gambling money. There are much better places to invest. If you want money, if you want an alternative to the fiat system, you've got gold, you've got silver. And if you want to make an investment, there are plenty of legitimate investments. There's a lot of opportunities, I think, in global markets around the world. That's where I invest my money. That's where I encourage my followers to look. I mean, certainly you can look at my company, Euro Pacific Asset Management, and we have a lot of mutual funds that focus on international investing. We help people diversify out of US dollars, out of US markets. I think there are a lot of smart places you can put your money. And I think had Michael Saylor been investing Strategy's money in something other than Bitcoin, he'd have a lot more to show than just a bunch of unrealized losses on an asset that he can't even sell because if Strategy tried to get rid of its Bitcoin, the market would implode."

"Great. Um, I'll say that it's great that Peter has this stance and it's great that a lot of people listen to Peter because when everybody agrees, consensus is there, there's no alpha left to be made. So, um, we want people to disagree, and that's your chance to continue stacking. I do want to just address one thing before I go into my closing, which is he said that, you know, Bitcoin is just too volatile. And, you know, the problem is that we're seeing both actually gold and Bitcoin are both being remonetized. Um, maybe gold remonetized and gold being monetized. And so that that is going to be naturally volatile. If you look at a gold chart, a gold to dollar mark chart after the Weimar Republic, and you look at the volatility overlay, it was incredibly volatile. But what I would say is over the last five years, gold finally started to move as I said, over the last two years. But if we look at the risk-adjusted returns, Bitcoin's delivered about a 1.0 sharp ratio against gold's 0.5, which means every unit of risk in Bitcoin has earned roughly double the excess return of gold in this cycle over the last five years. So volatility is still higher in Bitcoin. Yes, by a factor of several times. Yes. But the volatility has been trending down as it gets bigger, large lot of large numbers. And more importantly, most of it's been to the upside, as you can see in the Sortino ratio, it's about two times the sharp. But let me get into the closing piece because as I said, in sort of the intro, in the beginning, I agree with Peter on most things. I I'm here sort of in this chair because of what I've learned from him. Um, and I believe that the endless printing and the endless debasing and the endless inflating destroys purchasing power and I believe it creates a downfall in society, destroys the middle class. So Peter's been right on that for 20 years, and I agree with him on that. Again, where we disagree is a solution, right? The first part of the solution, sort of going back to get away from this claim on money and going back to a sound money, an equity-based money makes sense, but it falls apart when we start talking about that didn't work. How about we just try a different claim on gold? This time do better. We'll have a more fair, more freedom-oriented government or something like that. So I just don't see that. I think that's where it all falls apart. Uh, we know that as we move into this hyperconnected internet world, we need money that can move and settle at the speed of light, at the same speed as the transactions are. And if gold was too slow back then, in today's world, especially with AI, AI agents, as I've made the case, it's definitely going to be too slow to go in that point. And what I don't understand is I just don't understand again, after learning from Peter so much, why he would suggest to go back to a solution of issuing claims on top of something like that, right? Go back to go back to a layer, a new trust system on top of it. So I just don't understand that. I don't agree with that. Um, what I'd say is that if it didn't work back then, it's not going to work now. And as Peter said, gold didn't fail. Gold didn't fail. It was the system. It was the claim system that was put on top of gold that failed. And so, in order to solve those problems and make things work in the future, the bigger problems we need to solve, we need a global borderless money. We need censorship-resistant money. And we need instant on-chain final settlement because again, this is about the future, right? We're going forward. Technology doesn't change the needs that we have as humans, but it changes the way that we solve those needs. So if we go back to the exact same system that failed, it's just going to fail again. And so Bitcoin is the first monetary system in history that eliminates that trust layer entirely. So we don't need a vault. We don't need a custodian. We don't need government permission. We just need math. That's it. Now, I know it's only got 17 years of track record, and that's true. Gold had 5,000 years of history, too, before electricity, but it still was better at the end of the day. Gold was the greatest money in the physical world. I believe that. But again, we're not building a physical world anymore. We're building an AI economy, a digital economy, autonomous economy. Machines will transact with machines at the speed of software. And so we need a natively digital, equity-based final settlement money. And I believe that's Bitcoin. Again, Peter taught the world that debt-based money is the problem. I'm not sure why he's now changed his mind is suggesting that we go back to a debt-based money again. I just followed the logic all the way to the end."

"Well, a very passionate debate here tonight, right here on Zero Hedge. Thank you, Peter. Thank you, Mark. Mark, thank you for tuning in to our audience. Have a great night, everybody."

"Thank you. Thank you."