Gold advocate Peter Schiff, a well-known critic of Bitcoin, has admitted that he regrets not buying the cryptocurrency when it was first introduced to him by a colleague in 2010. In an interview with Real Vision co-founder and CEO Raoul Pal on March 13, Schiff hinted that he missed the opportunity to invest in Bitcoin early on. He stated, “Do I wish I had thrown $10,000, $50,000, $100,000 into it? Sure. I might be worth hundreds of millions now if I hadn’t sold, but I can’t say for sure what I would have done.”
The interview revolved around a debate between Pal and Schiff regarding whether Bitcoin is headed towards zero or $1 million. In a previous interview with Yahoo Finance on November 29, Schiff had referred to Bitcoin as a “pure Ponzi scheme” without any underlying value. However, in his latest interview, he revealed that he seriously considered buying Bitcoin when it was priced at around $1 in 2010. Ultimately, he decided against it, deeming the potential investment as “ridiculous.”
Despite his regrets, Schiff clarified that he still does not believe in the fundamentals of Bitcoin. He claims that if he had bought Bitcoin, he would have kept quiet about it. He believes that a successful investment in Bitcoin would have made him feel more like a “genius” rather than a “gambler,” falling into the same “delusion” as other Bitcoin investors, whom he described as “greedy” and “foolish.”
Schiff has long been attempting to dissuade his audience from investing in Bitcoin, consistently labeling it as a foolish investment. However, he occasionally acknowledges that Bitcoin has not collapsed as he had anticipated. To his dismay, Bitcoin has been increasingly regarded as “digital gold,” and some analysts argue that it has begun to eat into gold’s $14.6 trillion market cap since the launch of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the United States in January.
While Schiff acknowledges that gold may be losing some of its market share to spot Bitcoin ETFs, he believes that investors may struggle to cash out their funds when Bitcoin experiences a significant decline. Over the past decade, gold has increased by 91.8%, starting at $1,130 per ounce in 2010 and reaching $2,168 currently. However, it has been outperformed by various index funds, such as State Street’s Standard & Poor’s 500 ETF (SPY), which has seen a 350% increase during the same period.
At present, Bitcoin is the eighth-largest asset by value, with a market cap of $1.4 trillion, trailing behind gold, several U.S. tech stocks, and Saudi Aramco, according to Companies Market Cap data.