Peter Schiff

But

The Bitcoin industry was able to pay off a lot of politicians.

Well, first of all, gold is money.

It's not currency.

And so there's a difference between money and currency.

So currency...

is backed by money so when we were on a gold standard and we had paper that was redeemable in gold the paper was currency the gold was money so currency is like a money substitute but you can have two kinds of currency you can have legitimate currency which is backed by real money or you can have fiat currency which is backed by nothing and so what we have now is fiat currency and the question is what could replace that with bitcoin

And I don't think that that's possible because I don't think that Bitcoin has any value beyond its appeal that, you know, a greater fool is going to come and buy it.

Central banks can't hold Bitcoin as a reserve against their own currency.

If they had to sell it, I mean, the price would drop sharply, you know.

You have to have real money.

That's why all these central banks... But under our current system, you don't have real money.

Well, the main difference there is they're both, in a way, fiat.

Right.

In that both Bitcoin and the dollar derive their value from faith and confidence.

Right.

But...

Bitcoin, people are buying, most people who are buying Bitcoin are buying Bitcoin to get more dollars.

They're thinking the price is going to go way up and they'll be able to sell out and have more dollars than they started with.

Most people are not getting into Bitcoin because they just want a safe store of value.