The financial expert and uncompromising critic of the first cryptocurrency, Peter Schiff, has once again highlighted Bitcoin’s shortcomings by comparing it with gold. The community’s response was swift.
Losing the private key to your Bitcoin wallet is not the same thing as forgetting where you buried your gold. When gold is lost the world loses something — the potential use of that gold as a metal. When Bitcoin is lost the world loses nothing. #Gold is wealth. #Bitcoin is not.
— Peter Schiff (@PeterSchiff) January 25, 2021
According to Peter Schiff, forgetting where gold is buried is not equivalent to losing the private key to your Bitcoin wallet:
«If part of gold is lost, the world loses the ability to use that metal. With the loss of Bitcoin, the world loses nothing. Gold is wealth. Bitcoin is not», Schiff concluded.
The post attracted the attention of Bitcoin supporters. Chamath Palihapitiya, founder of Social Capital, asked Schiff whether he had arrived from [simple_tooltip content=’the year of the US Gold Rush’]1849 year[/simple_tooltip] or not.
And the host of the popular Bitcoin podcast Peter McCormack paraphrased the gold advocate’s conclusions:
Forgetting where you buried your gold is not the same as losing the private key to your Bitcoin wallet. When #Bitcoin is lost the world loses something — the potential use of that #bitcoin as money. When #Gold is lost the world loses nothing. #Bitcoin is wealth. #Gold is not.
— Peter McCormack (@PeterMcCormack) January 25, 2021
«Forgetting where you buried your gold is not equivalent to losing the private key to your Bitcoin wallet. With Bitcoin lost, the world loses the ability to use it as money. When gold is lost, the world loses nothing. Bitcoin is wealth. Gold is not».
The debate was settled by the renowned analyst Willy Woo, who stated that gold is used in the manufacture of microchips for ASIC miners.
This is true, gold is really useful.
Gold’s highest utility is in internal connections of chipsets, used to secure Bitcoin’s network, which routes digital value across the Internet.
I mean it’ll just be Bitcoin that keeps gold useful in the future 😉
— Willy Woo (@woonomic) January 25, 2021
«The main useful property of gold is its use in the internal connections of microchips, used to secure the Bitcoin network and transmit digital value across the Internet. And it is Bitcoin that will keep gold useful in the future», he wrote.
Overall, Twitter users reacted to Schiff’s post with irony:
— Thinking Crypto — YouTube Channel & Podcast (@ThinkingCrypto1) January 26, 2021
Back in January 2020, Peter Schiff lost access to a Bitcoin wallet containing $50. The cryptocurrency had been gifted to him in 2018 by Erik Voorhees, CEO of ShapeShift.
Initially Schiff believed his wallet had been compromised, but he later admitted that he had confused the PIN for the Blockchain wallet with its password.
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