Peter Schiff Says He Would Buy Bitcoin If It Went Under $1

Gold advocate and notorious Bitcoin BTC/USD critic Peter Schiff said that he would consider buying the top cryptocurrency if its price crashed to under one dollar.

What Happened: During a conversation between Bitcoin proponent and famous entrepreneur Anthony Pompliano and Schiff, the two exchanged their contrasting opinions on the world's biggest cryptocurrency and gold.

Other than Bitcoin itself, Schiff also bashed crypto mining stocks because they "don't mine anything" and just "solve math problems" and use a lot of electrical energy to do so.

He also added that he would not buy any of those stocks because he expects that after the Bitcoin price crashes, it would cost more to mine it than it is worth.

He also suggested that if he operated such a company, then he would issue and sell as many stocks as he could but not own any, expecting such a crash to take place.

The Golden Argument: When Pompliano asked him about potential reasons to buy Bitcoin, Schiff said that he would at most consider it an equivalent to buying lottery tickers with "play money," a thing that he has not done himself as of yet.

He explained that he considers gold "an actual commodity" while Bitcoin not, because gold sees use in the jewelry and electronics industries, while if he owned all Bitcoins in existence, he would not be able to do anything that he would have been able to do with just one.

"It doesn't matter how many [Bitcoins] you have."

Pompliano, on the other hand, claimed that "Bitcoin already replaced gold for people under the age of 35," to which Schiff answered that it had not replaced it "in the real world," gold is still used in jewelry and is still owned by central banks as a financial asset.

Pompliano pointed out that central banks recently became net gold sellers for the first time in 10 years.

The Bitcoin proponent also claimed that the definition of "sound money," which many believe to be a solution to financial crises and inflation, is a currency that is outside the financial system and more of which cannot be created by anyone.

Sound money is defined as money not liable to sudden appreciation or depreciation in value, or alternatively, a currency based on or redeemable in gold.

Schiff highlighted the gold-connected origin of the term "sound money" by noting that the reason why it is called this was is that a gold coin makes a sound when hitting a hard surface.

Read also: Ethereum Could Replace Bitcoin As The Dominant Store Of Value, Says Goldman Sachs

When he was asked, "what's the sound that Bitcoin makes when you drop it?" Pompliano likened it to Blockbuster, suggesting that their business has more value than Netflix because their VHS cassettes make a sound when they are dropped.

Pompliano also suggested that "there's a problem with the gold thesis," since inflation caused most financial assets to increase in value while "gold didn't go up in value in the last 12 months" because "it didn't even keep up with inflation."

Schiff blamed it on all the assets being overpriced in a bubble while gold — being money — is not.