Bankless - Why Peter Schiff Hates Bitcoin & The Bull Case for Gold

Episode Date: September 9, 2024

Why does Bitcoin sucks and is inferior to Gold? Peter Schiff is a financial commentator and economist that is relentlessly bullish on gold and a famous skeptic of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. He covers a ton of ground in this podcast, from what money really is, why gold can't be disrupted as the ultimate store of value, why we should abolish the Federal Reserve and principles to grow your wealth. ------ 🎬 DEBRIEF | Ryan & David Unpacking the Episode: https://www.bankless.com/debrief-the-peter-schiff-interview  ------ 📣 SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24  https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2    ⁠  🦄UNISWAP | BROWSER EXTENSION https://bankless.cc/uniswap  ⚡️ CARTESI | LINUX-POWERED ROLLUPS https://bankless.cc/CartesiGovernance  🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle    🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT  https://bankless.cc/toku   ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x0c294913a7596b427add7dcbd6d7bbfc7338d53f/59?referrer=0x077Fe9e96Aa9b20Bd36F1C6290f54F8717C5674E  ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 7:07 What is Money? 15:05 Why is Gold the Apex Money? 27:59 Gold vs. Bitcoin Custody 36:27 Gold in The Internet Age 43:08 Gold as a Productive Asset 49:30 Gold vs. Bitcoin Demographics 53:90 Can Gold be Disrupted? 1:04:20 Should we Abolish The Federal Reserve? 1:13:33 Is the Stock Market Overpriced? 1:20:09 Principles to Grow Wealth 1:25:30 Steelmanning Crypto 1:36:17 Closing & Disclaimers ------ RESOURCES Peter Schiff https://x.com/PeterSchiff   Peter Schiff Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@peterschiff   SchiffGold https://www.schiffgold.com/   ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures ⁠ 

Cigarettes are money in prisons, right? Not all the prisoners smoke, but some do. And that gives the cigarette's value because you can smoke them. But nobody could smoke Bitcoin, right? So there's no use there. I mean, people are smoking something who are buying Bitcoin. But, you know, Bitcoin is not the next evolution. Bitcoin is a step backwards. Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. And today we're exploring not a frontier. We're going back to the world of gold. We've got Peter Schiff on the podcast today, if you do not already know who Peter Schiff is. He's kind of a character. He's been memed pretty hard by the crypto industry as this guy who just refuses to be

bullish on Bitcoin. Yeah, David, Peter just loves gold. Can't get enough of it. I mean, he cannot get enough gold. He loves gold the way Michael Saylor loves Bitcoin. Like, maybe even more so. I would love to see those two guys debate, by the way. Oh my God. That would be something. That would be something. Can you imagine? There are some things that we agree about with Peter Schiff, like the value of hard money, debasement of fiat and currencies, but of course, we differ very widely on his stance towards Bitcoin and crypto. Since Peter's points are already well known by many in the space, we didn't spend too much energy refuting his stakes about Bitcoin. We instead just chose to listen and press on in the conversation. We touched on Bitcoin versus gold,

of course, but also his stakes on U.S. fiscal policy, if we should abolish the Fed, what Schiff would do if he were president and some other fun questions like that. My big question going to this episode actually David was like how does Peter store his gold and so we asked that in the beginning right basically like he was talking about like he actually mails he has customers who buy his gold coins he actually mails them via like mail service to their house you must have the transport had that part when my internet cut out for yeah I did I did because I disappeared from the middle of this podcast because my power were yeah David had to disappear at the beginning of the podcast it was just me solo like quizzing Peter on like how he stores his gold what is recommended how he transport

at all of these things. So it's just kind of like, it felt very from a crypto perspective, anachronistic almost. Like, why are we doing this? But anyway, you and I have a lot to unpack during the debrief. I can fill you in on that, the portion of the podcast that you missed. For bankless citizens, that is the episode that David and I record after the episode. It's available for you on the bankless premium feed, which is fantastic. That's where I listen to you or re-listen to all of the bankless episodes. In Spotify is my preferred way of doing that. No commercials. has these extra debrief episodes and so much more. So if you want to upgrade to bankless citizenship,

there is a link in the show notes. Guys, we're getting it right to the episode with Peter Schiff on gold. And why Bitcoin sucks, his words, not ours. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including our recommended exchange. Can't buy gold there. But you can buy Bitcoin.

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With Toku's guidance, you can concentrate on building your company while Toku handles the logistics. Token launches don't have to be complicated. Talk to Toku today to get a free initial token valuation. Bankless Nation, I'm very excited to introduce you for the first time on bankless to Peter Schiff. He is a financial commentator. He's an economist. He's got some outspoken views on, I would say a lot of things, but like the global economy, financial markets, shortcomings of the government and their policies, fiat currency,

a lot of things he's short on. But unlike most fiat critics, you've probably heard on this podcast on bankless. Peter is relentlessly bullish, not on Bitcoin, not on crypto, but on gold. I think he's an overall skeptic on cryptocurrency. So there's a ton to talk about today. Peter, welcome to you bankless. Thanks for having me on, guys. Yeah, I mean, I'm not just a skeptic on Bitcoin. I mean, I know it's not going to work.

But gold does. Zing! We're starting there, huh? Yeah, well, gold does. I mean, gold's real money. So for all the people who are rightly concerned, like I am, about fiat currency, about central banks and inflation and all the debt, and they're looking for an alternative. that they want a real store value that can also be, you know, medium of exchange and unit of account, you don't have to reinvent the wheel. You know, gold works just fine. And in fact, it works even better

thanks to modern technology like the internet, like blockchain, that have the potential to make gold an even better medium of exchange than it has been in the past. Peter, you said gold is real money. What is real money? What is real money? What is money to you? How are you defining this money word? Well, I don't have my own definition. I just look at classic definition. So what money is is the most marketable commodity. Because you have to look back at the origin of money. You know, where did it come from? You know, we didn't always have money. And so before we had money, humans traded through barter. And so in barter, if I had a good that you wanted and you had a good that I wanted, you know, we could exchange and we would both benefit. But

that's very cumbersome because you need a confluence of needs. I have to want what you have and you have to want what I have. And if we don't, we can't trade. And so eventually, societies discovered that you could take one commodity that everybody could accept in exchange for whatever they had. Even if you didn't need that commodity, you knew that somebody else would. And so that was the invention of money, where people would accept a commodity. not because they needed it, but because they knew somebody else might need it and they could hold on to it. But in order to be money, there were a lot of characteristics that a commodity would have to have. And that excluded most commodities from being viable money. But a lot of different

commodities over the centuries were tried. But the one that was the most successful over the centuries was gold. And gold beat out other forms of money in a competitive free market. And, you know, the characteristics that, you know, you have, gold is portable, it's divisible, it's immutable, it doesn't decay. So it has all these things that money has to have. And because it doesn't decay, it's a store of value. So if I accept gold in exchange for my goods or services, I can hold on to the gold for a while. I don't need to immediately, you know, turn around and exchange it. I can hold on to it a year later, five years later, and it's just as valuable as a day I received.

it. But Bitcoin, what they tried to do with Bitcoin is they copied a lot of the qualities that made gold a better form of money than other commodities. But they left out the most important aspect of the whole thing was the underlying value of the commodity itself, because money has to be an actual commodity. So it's an actual good that has value in and of itself. Right. And Bitcoin doesn't have that. has these properties without the underlying value. And without the value, you can't be a store value because you have nothing to store. See, in that sense, Bitcoin has a lot in common with fiat. See, legitimate currency is currency that's backed by actual money. And the original currency was back by real money because nobody would just take paper. But because the paper was backed by gold,

it was really a warehouse receipt for gold. People accepted paper because they knew they can go to the warehouse and get the gold. It was an IOU evidence of ownership for gold. Governments eventually figured out how to create fiat currency, which was backed by nothing. They would mandate that it was legal tender and people would use it. They would demand it as payment of taxes, which is like a tribute to the government. But at the end of the day, what really gives fiat currency value, it's not just the government decree. It's confidence, it's faith. People have to believe, that it will be accepted in the future the way it's accepted in the present. So it's really that belief set that gives it value. Government helps create that belief, right, and get people

to believe in it because it's got the backing of a government. But plenty of governments have seen their currencies wiped out. They go to zero when the confidence is lost. And so Bitcoin has that aspect in common. It's all based on confidence. It doesn't get its value the way gold does. which is because it's a metal that people need. Look, I put on, I knew I was going to be on this podcast. I got, you know, a gold bracelet on, a gold watch. I got a ring. You're blinging it up. It's actually super impressive. It's a real thing. And it's not just used, you know, as jewelry. It's used in electronics. It's used in dentistry. It's used in aerospace. I mean, it would be used even more, but it's too expensive, right? But for most of the jobs that other metals are doing, gold could actually do it better. But, you know, gold only goes to its highest and best use because it is so scarce. So people only use it if they have to. But Bitcoin, nobody has to use Bitcoin for anything because you can't use it for anything. So it's just a token that people buy because they hope somebody else buys it at a higher price.

Well, there's thousands of other tokens that are like that, tens of thousands, actually. And there's no limit to how many can be created in the future. they may have a different name than Bitcoin, but other than that, you know, and they may even be better in a sense that, you know, they may be cheaper, you know, faster, you know, to use or, you know, in fact, they've already come up with cryptos that are better. But as far as I'm concerned, none of them have any value. What the future of blockchain is going to be backing it by real money. So just like legitimate currency was backed by real money, you could have a cryptocurrency that's also backed by real money. You could theoretically tokenize gold, but the tokens that you're

creating themselves are not gold. They're just tokens. But what they can do is they can represent ownership of gold. And so instead of me sending you my gold, you know, which, you know, I have to, you know, put it in the mail and ship it to you, if you're not, you know, right here where I can hand it to you, instead of giving you the gold, I can just give you my ownership of that gold by transferring that ownership to you visually, which I could do instantaneously at basically zero cost. So it's a lot more efficient than transferring Bitcoin. The difference is when I transfer gold ownership to you, I'm giving you something. When I transfer my Bitcoin, I'm giving you nothing. I'm just giving you the hope that you have that you'll be able to make a similar transfer with an even greater fool

at some point in the future. So that's basically the bottom line. And just, you know, one thing, people try to say that Bitcoin is digital gold. And it's no more digital gold than a image of a hamburger is digital food. I mean, you can't eat digital food. You know, you're going to starve to death if your only diet is digital food. So that's the same thing with gold. You know, gold has to be physical because the properties of gold are physical. I can't make jewelry without physical gold. I can't conduct electricity without physical gold, right? Gold needs to be physical. And gold There are some things that can be digital. Music could be digital. I can listen to digital music, you know, just as easily as listening to a record, right? I can read a book digitally. I don't need to have the actual physical book in my hand. I can read the words.

So some things, you know, could be digital. But other things like food and gold can't. So, Peter, we on bankless, we have told the story of like the anthropological journey of money a handful of times. This is honestly like one of my favorite stories, these ideas that societies will come up with their own monies internally, then these societies will discover each other, and then their two monies will compete, and one will end up on top. And gold is the one, the apex predator of this competition for money. I think it's one of the more fascinating stories

about money that exists. But that begs the question, why is gold the final destination? Why is gold the final equilibrium of this Darwinian fight to be the best money? Why does it have to stop it gold? Why can't there be something in the future that surpasses gold, as so many's have surpassed other monies over time. Why is gold the final destination? Well, I mean, you know, it's been the best form of money for hundreds of years and nothing has come around that's been better. But look, you know, you can use other things as money. It doesn't have to be gold. And, you know, you could use other things as money. I mean, you know, I'm not against other commodities that people want to use them as money. They can't, right? I mean, look, you know, cigarettes are

in prisons, right? Not all the prisoners smoke, but some do. And that gives the cigarette's value, because you can smoke them, right? But nobody could smoke Bitcoin, right? So there's no use there. I mean, people are smoking something who are buying Bitcoin. But, you know, Bitcoin is not the next evolution. Bitcoin is a step backwards if anybody was to look at it. I mean, look, they've been trying to come up with gold, you know, the alchemists of their day, we're trying to come up with it. This is just the latest iteration of that. It's called fools gold. You know, just because it's on the blockchain, you know, does it change the dynamic? I call it a blockchain letter, which is really what it is. That's what's new. It's just a newer way to repackage

an old con, which is a pyramid scheme, chain letter, Ponzi. I mean, those are the words that describe what's going on with Bitcoin. I will grant it that as far as Ponzi's go or a pyramid, this is one of the most successful ones there's been. Maybe it's the most successful. Maybe it's going to go on for a while longer. Maybe it's already peaked. I mean, I know that Bitcoin is down over 30% from its peak almost three years ago in terms of gold. So I think that says a lot that despite all the hype that we've seen in the last few years, you know, El Salvador, Michael Saylars, all the ETFs, first Bitcoin, Ethereum, NFTs. Super Bowl ads, you know, all this stuff, Wall Street coming in, you know, Republican convention,

you know, let's get the U.S. government to use taxpayer money to buy Bitcoin, all that, they've thrown everything at Bitcoin and it's not making new highs. So that's got to tell you that there's some serious money that's been selling Bitcoin for the last few years. My guess is the people who are selling it are a lot smarter than the people who were buying it. They probably bought it a long time ago and knew they were going to hype it up and hats off to them, you know, they succeeded. But now in order to really complete, they have to get out, right? Because you have to turn your paper wealth into real wealth. You know, you want to buy things with your Bitcoin. You got to sell the Bitcoin first. And so that's what's going on. But I feel sorry for a lot of the people

who are buying now, who have bought over the last few years, who are going to lose a lot of money. These are the bag holders in any pyramid scheme. It's the people that come in at the end. And they're the ones that make it possible for the people that came in at the beginning to make money, right? There's no real money being made here. It's just the transfer. Wealth is transferred from the people who buy the Bitcoin to the people who sell it. And it's actually a negative sum game because, you know, you have to cut in the miners and there's a whole cottage industry built around hyping up Bitcoin. So it's not even a zero-sum game. It's a negative-sum game if you think of it that way, because it's like a casino.

with a huge rake. Because there's so many people grabbing money out of the pot that at the end of the day, even some of the winners end up losing. And so, Peter, your explanation for like why Bitcoin, like, so some people would hear what you said and be like, well, you know, gold has had 10,000 years or whatever through civilization. Bitcoin has had 15 years. And it's $1.2 trillion in value. I mean, for 15 years old, that's not too shabby. What is that? Like 15% of the market cap of gold? Something to that effect. Well, you're making my point. I mean, Bitcoin's only better around for 15 years. Talk to me in a thousand years. Let's see. It's still around. We're going to be around a thousand years? Peter? What do you know that I don't? I don't

know. Well, AI's coming, right? Maybe it'll make us immortal. Okay, I have a few questions. So it seems like the crux of your argument. And by the way, I guess we'll get right to the, you know, crypto, Bitcoin versus Gold kind of conversation immediately. But like, we have some other things we want to talk about. But one of your main points about Bitcoin is that there's no underlying sort of utility, let's say, right? So gold, you can use an electronic. gold has some consumption good value. It's sort of a commodity in that way. One use case for Bitcoin is actually you pay Bitcoin on the network in order to send Bitcoin. So I guess in a way, that's sort of a utility, right? There's an exchange for it. Yeah, I mean, but the question is, yes, yes,

I can send you my Bitcoin. I've acknowledged that. But a lot of that is dependent on a market for Bitcoin in the future, which there may not be. Fair enough. Fair enough. So that's somewhat recursive. I get it. But the question is, there are other blockchains where I I can do the same thing with their token. Ethereum. And so it's not like, I mean, gold does things that other metals simply can't. And that's where gold is used. Where other metals can do it, maybe not as good, they use other metals because gold's too expensive.

But I don't see that with Bitcoin. And it would be very rare. Think about it this way. I mean, when you search, are you using spyglass or America? I can't even remember some of the earlier search engines. I mean, even Yahoo was a big one. Actually, I don't Google anymore. I use ChatGBTBT. Yeah, I use perplexy. I have removed the Google app from my phone. Yeah, well, I mean, so in fact, I agree with you. I'm already not using Google as much as I'm using chat GPT for a lot of things.

So, I mean, do you still have a MySpace account? You know, I mean, Facebook took over that and then Instagram came along, TikTok came along. You know, you're always coming up with something better. So to say that Satoshi, right, came up with Bitcoin, whatever it was 13, 14 years ago, and nothing will be better. that that is the greatest cryptocurrency that will ever be created from now until the end of time, and nothing is going to improve on that. I mean, it's this nonsense.

That's never happened. The first TV is not the best TV. The first phone was not the best phone. The first car, the first plane, anything that man invents, man can make better. Man did not invent gold. God did. It came from the supernova, right? You know, it's been here since the beginning of time.

And so that's different than technology that always gets better with human ingenuity. And there's also, you know, things are fads, right? People all of a sudden, you know, people don't stuff phone booths anymore. I mean, they don't even have phone booths, but they don't have pet rocks, you know, and one day they won't have Bitcoin. You know, it's just like it's popular now. It's part of the culture. So, Peter, there are cryptocurrencies that have more utility, right?

So one of which you've named, it has an ETF as well. It's called Ethereum. And so that actually has some induced demand outside of the, Ethereum economy. In other words, like, you can do tokenized treasuries. You can even do tokenized gold on Ethereum when you pay to move that tokenized gold. Yes, tokenized gold has value. You create a smart contract. But you're paying some gas fees, and that goes into the value. That traits utility value inside of Ethereum. Do you think that has a chance to be a store of value like gold does? Yeah, except tokenized gold actually works better on other blockchains,

where the gas is a fraction of the cost of Bitcoin. So just because I've created a gold token, I don't need the Ethereum blockchain in order to have it. I can use other blockchains that are more competitive. And so, yeah, I'm not saying that there's no value in blockchain whatsoever, but it's the tokens, these native tokens, that are of dubious value. Yeah, I get it. And isn't possible that Bitcoin's value is something above zero? Yeah. I mean, if you want to argue that it has some value that's not zero. I'm not going to, you know, argue a lot that maybe it has some value above zero. But it's not $60,000 above zero. I don't think it's anywhere close to that number. Look, I created an NFT, and I stuck it on, it was not an NFT, an ordinal, and I put it on the Bitcoin

blockchain. Thank you for you. That's cool. You know, you can go buy it at what Magic Eden is called Golden Triumph. I sold like 100 of these things. But you can go on there and buy, and there's a secondary market form. But when I initially sold them, you got a signed original print with my signature on it with your ordinal. So you actually had something real that you can hang on your wall, and it was scarce. And now, I only made 100 of them. And I've never made another one since. So it's the first and only Peter Schiff original painting, and that's also an ordinal or print. We actually made an original painting, and no one's bought that yet. I didn't get a high enough price for the painting, so I kept it. But we sold the prints.

Yeah, see, people like digital things like this. Yeah, wait. Okay, so another piece of your argument, you said, what gives fiat currency values people have to believe? Isn't that the thing that gives all monetary units value? No. Isn't the thing that gives Bitcoin value or even gold value is you have kind of consensus belief that this is a good instrument to store your value? You don't think that this is all a coordination consensus game all the way down? No, because you don't have to believe in an actual commodity, like gold. Gold has value because of its monetary properties that are so useful to man or women, humans. Now, some humans may value gold more than others, right? But there is value there that is

undeniable. Well, that's like a floor value. It's got like a commodity value that's worth what? I don't know, one trillion, one point two trillion. Everything above that is like, you know, it's monetary value. No, no, the idea that the value of gold, right, I hear this from the Bitcoin people all the time, that only 10% or whatever of gold's market cap is because of its metal, and the rest is because it's money, which is not even close to true, because nobody other than central banks, are even using it as money today. Yes, people are storing gold, you know, as a store value, but they're storing that gold because there is real demand. in the future for that gold.

Somebody ultimately is going to use that gold. They may not be alive yet, but they're going to need it. And in fact, we're actually discovering more uses for gold all the time. There are more uses for gold today than there were 100 years ago, than there were a thousand years ago. And of course, there's more people. But so the gold that we have today, today's price represents the present value of its use into the future in perpetuity.

So no other commodity really is like that, because no other commodity is going to be here that long into the future. But gold will. And so I would say that the monetary premium that gold might have extra to its price is probably as small as it's ever been. And that's one of the reasons

that I think that the price is still so low. I think that there's very little premium built into the price of gold right now because it's not being used. as money. I think it will be. In fact, I think the world is going to remonitize gold. I think we're going to go back on the gold standard. I mean, I think there's no other way this Fiat experiment is going to end other than a return to gold. And when that happens, gold's price is going to have to be much, much higher than it is today. One other thing I want to understand from you is. So when you talk about, you know, gold and its virtues, how do you advise that people actually hold their gold? There's multiple ways to hold it, right? You mentioned, you know, tokenized gold on a blockchain could be one, but you also said that was an I.O. You know, you you know, you can buy gold ETFs, that's an IOU as well. Do you advise that people like hold gold bars

in custody themselves or like buy these instruments in IOUs or like what's the preferred method? Well, I've got shift gold backdrops. It's shift gold.com. So shift gold sells gold that we actually ship out to you so that you can store it yourself. Like gold bars, like actual nuggets or gold bars or something like this.

Yeah, most people buy coins. Okay, coins. But yeah, we sell coins on bars. Coins legally have to be, made by a government. And so we sell a lot of gold coins. They legally have to be made by a government? In order to be legally called a coin. Okay. Right. A private mint can take gold and make it into a round little object. Okay. But you can't call it a coin unless it's legal tender. Really? Right. You know, a lot of gold coins are legal tender somewhere. They're legal tender in the U.S., in Canada, in Australia,

you know, wherever they're made. But you can still, a private mint can mint around, you know, just call it around, right, as opposed to a coin. But we sell, you. You know, you know, you know, gold bars and coins, silver directly. And I recommend that people have physical gold and silver, you know, in their possession, especially if you're, you know, prepping for some kind of gloom and doom scenario, which could happen, hyperinflation or, you know, price. But like how much? Can you actually hold this in size? Like, let's say I want to buy like, you know, $250,000 worth of like gold coins. I mean, how much does that weigh? Like, I'm not, I don't know if I'm comfortable. It doesn't weigh that. I mean, you can put it in a shoe box and still have a lot of room left over.

And like, you would mail that to my house and just like through UPS or something and they're not going to open that $250,000 package. Yeah, and it's shipped and insured. You know, we've been selling gold at shift gold for over a decade and none of it's ever been lost. None of it's ever been stolen. It always arrives. You know, obviously they don't write on their, you know, gold inside. But it is very heavy, especially if you buy silver. Silver is bulky. Yeah. You know, I had a shift gold customer bought $300,000 worth of silver during the pandemic, and they had a ship into my house, and he came and picked it up because they wouldn't ship to him, so I was in Puerto Rico. But, I mean, it took up a lot of space to bring it. But again, if it was gold, he could have put it in a shoebox, and it would have been no big deal. And one of the reasons that gold is better money is because it's a hell of a lot easier to store than other metals, like even silver. But, I mean, imagine storing copper, right? How much space you need,

You need a warehouse to have that much copper. No, it'd be terrible. It'd be terrible. And by the way, this is a reason I've stayed away from kind of the gold game or the commodities game is just like custody is so difficult. But like, say I wanted to buy. Well, not with gold. Not with gold.

But $300,000 worth of gold. Like, how do I secure that in like my own custody? I mean, you can hide in somewhere in your house. Just don't forget where you put it or you can have a safe, you know, and put it in there. Just don't lose the combination. Don't lose your combination or lose your keys. But look, it's probably a lot easier.

Look, what little Bitcoin I have, I lost because I didn't have my seed phrase. I didn't buy it. I got some Bitcoin gifted to me, but it's all lost. So, I mean, you can lose Bitcoin. I've lost, you know, you can lose gold. I mean, you can lose anything, right? But also, if you want to buy it and have a third party store it, you know, shift gold could arrange storage in Switzerland, in Dubai, in Singapore. You can have your gold stored reputably around the world if you don't want to store it yourself. You could also use Wall Street, You can buy ETFs that hold gold. And then, yes, you don't own the gold directly. You own a share of a public entity that owns the gold. That's what some people are doing with Bitcoin. It's like kind of ironic that the whole selling point of Bitcoin was that self-custody, no third parties. And now all the demand is coming from third parties and custody your Bitcoin and charge you a storage fee. But yeah, people are buying Bitcoin ETF. So, you know, there's gold ETFs. I mean, this is one thing. Would you concede that this is one thing that Bitcoin or cryptocurrency has over gold in that it's more portable over the internet? So like you were mentioning, hey, I could put this gold

in a shoebox or I could bury it somewhere in my house. I could put it in a vault. Well, with Bitcoin, you can have like a 12 seed phrase brain wallet, basically, just like memorize those 12 words and you could take it anywhere in the world. Yes, I mean, that is a very interesting aspect. It's kind of cool, right? But the problem is, the reason that it's so easy to say, send Bitcoin is because you're sending nothing, right? So the minute I'm sending nothing, nothing is a lot easier to send than something. Gold is an actual thing. And so obviously, I can't send you the actual thing that has weight and substance, you know, until we have like the transporters, you know, like they had in Star Trek. You know, once they have that, then I can

take my bar gold and beam it over to you, right? And then it's just, it's just as easy to move. I think you're getting caught up on this physical element that just like doesn't seem as important, I think, to a lot of like people listening or maybe younger generations where like we would say it has physical substance and weight like on the internet, you know, digitally. I mean, actually the fact that gold has like physical characteristics in the real world is sort of a negative property to me. It means it could get stolen. Very uninteresting for younger generations. No, that's what makes it money. Remember, we start the conversation. It has to be a commodity because Bitcoin. Bitcoin could just collapse at any point in time. The reason it's not collapsing yet is because you still have more people wanting to buy it than who want to sell it. So on balance, you know, there's enough buying to support the market. But we do know that everybody who owns Bitcoin needs to sell.

They don't have to sell all of it, but they have to sell some of it. People who own Bitcoin have to eat, you know, they got to pay their rent, right? They got to travel. They got to do things. And if they have Bitcoin and they need to sell a Bitcoin to do those things. So there's all the people who own Bitcoin are going to be selling Bitcoin. And so you have to get new people who don't own Bitcoin to come in and buy it. And as long as that's going on, you know, the price doesn't collapse. But there's going to be a point where you don't have enough money coming in to enable the money to go out. And then the whole thing implodes, which is... No, I mean, I get that it's a younger asset, of course. I would say the same is true of gold, which is you have to have interested buyers in order to prop this whole thing up.

But yeah. You have industry. One advantage, I think that gold has, and I think that a lot of listeners will appreciate, is basically it has thousands of years of history behind it in terms of prominence. There are industries right now that need gold, that buy gold all the time because they need it. Sure, right. I showed you, here's my gold jewelry. Yeah, and then there's a physical real world demand. There's a huge industry. Now, you know, I know with the internet, a lot of guys have digital girlfriends now. So maybe you can give them digital gold. But if you want to have a girlfriend in the real world, you know, you're going to be getting her real jewelry. And it can't be made at a Bitcoin, right? They're going to want gold jewelry. And so there's industries that are buying gold right now. And if the price of gold goes down, those industries are going to say, oh, I'm going to buy my gold right today. The price went down. I need gold. let me take advantage of it. Nobody is going to be like, oh my God, Bitcoin is cheaper. Let me buy the Bitcoin that I need because you don't need Bitcoin. It's like the only thing, the reason that people want it is because the price is going up. And so when the price stops going up,

there's no reason to buy it. And then everybody wants to get rid of it. And there's this industrial use case for gold. There's also, I suppose, an ornamental use case for gold, too, that you're talking about here. I want to ask you for the question. Something to come back to is so you said the internet actually makes gold better. In what ways does the internet make gold better? Because I would think it's just like what we're talking about now is exchanging IOUs. We're not talking about exchanging a bare instrument. So if you talk about tokenized gold or something, that's just like a less good product versus just like actually owning the gold yourself and having a true bare instrument. So what about the internet makes gold better?

Well, it's a good question. So paper made gold better too. Initially, when it was legitimate. So it is not that easy, right, for me to hand you my bar of gold, right, because it's a big physical bar, right? And maybe I want to buy something that doesn't cost as much as my whole bar. I mean, how do I deal with it, right? I can't just, you know, just like shave it off and you don't know how much I've just taken. But they had coins, you know, for, you know, they made gold coins smaller and then they made coins out of silver and other metals. But private enterprise came up with the idea of a note currency, where a bank, a private bank, although it started probably with the goldsmiths, that would be storing gold and that would issue a warehouse receipt for that gold in the form of an IOU,

a claim check. Like when you go and you check your coat and they give you a little piece of paper that is a receipt for the coat that they're storing, right? And so the same thing would happen with gold. But people realize that, you know what, instead of going down to the blacksmith and getting the gold, It's a long trip on my horse to get over there. I'll just give you my claim check, and now you have the right to get the gold. You can go down and pick it up whenever you want, right?

Why should we make all these trips to get the gold? Just take this warehouse receipt, right? And so that would circulate. And then banks did that. Private banks would hold the gold in their vault, and they would give their customers bills, paper that were IOUs, that were more fungible, that were more easily divisible and exchangeable and portable. than the gold itself. And so these pieces of paper, this note currency, derived its value from the gold. It had no

intrinsic value on its own. But because it was backed by gold, it was now a superior form of money. And we called it a money substitute in economics. The internet improves on that even more. Because now, instead of the bank giving you a bill, a piece of paper, which is still physical, right, in nature, they now issue you a digital token, which can now live on a blockchain or either public or private or however you want to do it. And you don't even need a blockchain. You can still just digitally represent it. But there's all sorts of ways that we can now tokenize ownership of gold or utilize the internet to make it even easier for me to transfer my ownership of gold to you. And so because cost of this new technology, gold works even better than it's ever worked as a meaning of exchange.

It's faster. It's more divisible. It's less expensive. So this is the evolution. The problem is a lot of people have assumed that, oh, now we have blockchain. We don't need gold anymore because we could just create Bitcoin. No, that is not the solution. Gold is going to exist long after Bitcoin is dead, but gold may still be living on a blockchain. But that's settlement. for like, you know, even tokenized gold or just like, you know, gold ETFs or something like that, that has so much trust implication because you're trusting whoever's issuing it actually has the gold that backs it. You know, you're trusting the overall legal system to, you know, protect your property rights is just like incomparable to actually owning physical gold and being able to self-custody

something like this. Yeah, when you own physical gold, yes, that's why you don't want to have all of your gold in that way, right? But you want to keep your gold that you store with a highly respectable third party that you can trust. Maybe the third party also has insurance in case the gold is lost or stolen. And there's a reputable insurance company that stands behind it and maybe a reinsurance company. You know, trust is a big part of the capitalist system. We wouldn't have an insurance industry without trust. I mean, everybody has insurance. insurance. You have life insurance, health insurance, fire insurance. All of this is trusting the insurance company that is going to pay you when you put in a claim. And so how do you know? How do you know,

can I trust this counterparty? Well, you have agencies that rate the companies. You have reviews, right? You know, other people's experiences, did they pay their claims? Or they not pay their claims? So you do research. So the same thing would happen with gold. And it was happening. People have trusted their third parties to hold their gold for thousands of years. It's worked. But yeah, I mean, an argument about Bitcoin is you don't have to trust a third party. And I will grant it that if you self-custody your Bitcoin, not the ETFs, if you self-custodied Bitcoin, you don't have to trust a third party to hold it. But you still have to trust. You have to trust the market, that people still want it. You have to have trust in this scheme continuing. And I don't want to do

that. I mean, I'd rather own gold that I'd rather own gold that I'm I don't have to trust and then trust the custodian, then not have a custodian, but have to trust that the thing that I'm holding is still going to have value because it may not. It's all about perception. And even if it has some value, like even if Bitcoin is worth $1,000 a token, I doubt it's worth that much, right? And what I'm talking about worth? I'm not talking about price, right? The market price is whatever some idiot will pay, right? So right now, you know, fools are paying, you know, $58,000, whatever, for a Bitcoin. But let's say the actual value is 1,000 if it's that high.

I mean, that means you're going to lose a tremendous amount of money if you buy it at 58,000. I mean, if you buy your Bitcoin at 58,000 and it goes to 1,000, it might as well go to zero. Because you've already lost 99% of your money, right? The last little bit is going to be a small consolation to you if you buy it. Peter, the difference that you like to emphasize between gold and Bitcoin is the fact that, like, some industries truly need gold. They must buy gold in order to produce whatever product. that they are producing. Yeah. It's got inherent demand from industries who has equity. These have equities, and that equity is productive because this industry must be buying gold to produce a

product, and then they're selling that product at a higher price than all of the costs it went to produce that product. And so there's some productivity happening, some commerce is happening. So if that's the part about gold that you truly like, is there are productive companies that are turning it into a greater value so they can sell a product, why so much interest in gold instead of the productive companies that are producing like cash flowing dividends or yield. If that's the argument that you like about gold over Bitcoin, why not just go straight for the productive asset side of the investment spectrum? Yeah, well, I'm doing that. In fact, I have a lot more of my own money in gold mining companies than I do in the gold that they're mining. Now, of course, when I own a gold mining

stock, I own a share of all that unmined gold that's in the ground, which obviously is not worth as much as the gold that's already been mined because there's a lot of unknowns there. with respect to extracting it. But yeah, I mean, I like gold mining stocks. I think they're very inexpensive, historically relative to gold. And I think that people will make a lot of money in these stocks. But there's a lot more risk there than in just owning gold. I mean, I look at gold as a money, right? So gold, to me, competes with dollars, competes with euros, yen, and other currencies that are also functioning as money, right, or as a money substitute. I think gold is superior. And if people save gold in the future, they'll have a lot more buying power than if they hoard these other

fiat currencies that governments are creating. Gold mining stocks are businesses. So they compete with other businesses that you could invest in. And they're not just the only commodity. You can buy oil companies. You can buy, you know, agricultural companies, all kinds of businesses. And I have a lot of different types of stocks in my portfolio. It's just that my largest area of concentration is the mining sector. And, you know, that's been a mistake because some of my other sectors have done better over the years because I think, you know, these stocks are still so cheap. But yeah, I do advocate it because I do think if gold does what I think it's going to do, which is go from $2,500, where it is now, to, you know, $20,000, $30,000, wherever it's going to go. I think the

percentage gains in the mining stocks is going to be much, much greater. I mean, orders of magnitude greater, especially if it gets there quickly. And I do think that once gold starts to move is going to be a quick repricing at a much higher level. And so that's going to be a huge shock to the earnings and valuations of these companies. And Wall Street is way underinvested in these mining stocks. So I think it's a real opportunity. Now it doesn't come without risk. And, you know, I could be wrong. Right. I've been wrong about stuff. And so, you know, you have to be prepared. I think that if you buy gold, it's very hard to lose money buying gold. I mean, very hard. In fact, nobody who's bought gold, you know, with the exception of a few people maybe are down, right? Gold's at an all-time record high.

I mean, it's at 2,500, 2490 as I speak. It's down a bit today. But the highest it's been is 2530. So, I mean, nobody can be down more than a percent or so, you know, as opposed to just about everything else, people can be way downed depending on when they bought it. But so it's hard. And even if gold pulls back, I mean, goal's been rising when this century started in the year 2000, 2001, gold was 270. Goal's gone up more than eightfold this century. The Dow has gone up fourfold from like 10,000 to 40,000. So you've had a much bigger move. You go back to the origin of the Federal Reserve in 1913. Gold was $20 an ounce. So now, it's 2,500. The dollars lost more than 99% of its value. So gold is a safe store of value.

Gold mining companies can go bankrupt. They're businesses. They have all kinds of operational risks associated with them. There's political risk. Two, governments can come in and nationalize a mine. You know, a mine can collapse. You know, people die. They sue the company. The mine goes out of production. I mean, all kinds of gold mining is probably one of the riskiest businesses you can get There's so many things can go wrong. And of course, they do go wrong, right? That's Murphy's law. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong, especially if you own a gold mine.

So, you know, it's a tough business. I know I got all the battle scars. But I do think that ultimately people are going to make a ton of money. So if you're, you know, a bitcoiner and you've got dreams of riches because you think your Bitcoin's going to the moon, if you want to take a shot on a moon shot, that's where you ought to be. Forget about gold, buy the mining stocks. Best thing to do, be diversified, get a portfolio.

Again, you don't have to reinvent the wheel. I got the portfolio. The Europe Pacific Gold Fund, managed by Adrian Day. I think he's the best guy in the business, been doing it 30, 40 years. I picked them for a reason to manage my fund. I knew I didn't know enough about gold to manage it myself. Not gold, the companies that mine it. He's the best.

And so he's managing my fund. You can buy it no load if you have a discount brokerage firm, E-P-I-G-X is the no-load, it's the investors' advisors class. Europe's the gold fund. But that's where you should go. You should get rid of that Bitcoin. You're gambling in the wrong casino. You're going to lose.

I do love your passion for gold, Peter. If you get into gold stocks, at least you got a good shot and make it a lot of money. Okay, so maybe one last question. I think you'll find a lot of people listening to this podcast just in crypto, like bullish on gold relative to fiat. Like, it's a great asset, particularly if you think governments will continue to print money and like they will right anyone who is listening to bankless sort of knows this you know this peter one question for you though like last question on gold maybe versus crypto are you worried

that the demographics are not in your favor so it's sort of like a old young type thing so when i talk to like colleagues you know millennials you know gen z these sorts of things they're not necessarily wearing the gold watch or the gold chain right they're internet native i mean some of them are like in parts, but like not really. They're internet native. They find gold kind of like bulky. What if the demographics just aren't in your favor? So they hear everything you're saying about a non-sovereign store of value. And they're just like, oh, cool, Bitcoin or gold, Bitcoin or gold. Crypto or gold. Oh, crypto. Makes sense for me. And do you do see this from like younger generations and do you think that could be headwinds against kind of the gold use case? Because it's a consensus. It's a store of value

consensus. People have to want to store their value in gold in order for it to accrue that monetary premium. First of all, even if they don't wear gold, they have gold in their cell phones or other electronics and things like that. They don't even realize that they own gold. But I think the demographics work in my favor because all these young people are going to get older. And as they get older, they get wiser. They learn from their mistakes. So all these 20-somethings that are into Bitcoin, when they're in their 40s, they'll be in the gold. Right. So, you know, I know that the demographics favor gold because people get older,

they don't get younger. And they get wiser. They don't get dumber, right, as you get older. You know, every generation thinks that they know more than the generations before them. Everybody thinks that, aha, you know, because you're young and you're Night Eve. You don't know, right? And I'm sure that when you're older and you have kids or grandkids and they're telling you about the next fad.

And you'll say, you know, let me tell you something, son. You ever hear something called Bitcoin? You know, ah, yeah, let me tell you how I lost all my money in Bitcoin. And, you know, I've been there, done that. So let me try to save you from yourself. And they'll say, ah, what do you know, pops? You're too old. You're, this is new.

So, yeah, no, this is come and gone. Nothing is new, as I said. It's just a repackaged scam scheme that, you know, that's falling apart, you know, over and over again. And every time it's been tried. You know, it doesn't matter how you repackage it, you know, it is what it is. New projects are coming online to the Mantle Layer 2 every single week. Why is this happening? Maybe it's because Mantle has been on the frontier of Layer 2 design architecture

since it first started building Mantle DA, powered by technology from EigenDA. Maybe it's because users are coming onto the Mantle Layer 2 to capture some of the highest yields available in Defi and to automatically receive the points and tokens being accrued by the $3 billion dollar mantle treasury in the mantle reward station. Maybe it's because the mantle team is one of the most helpful teams to build with giving you grants, liquidity support, and venture partners to help bootstrap your mantle application. Maybe it's all of these reasons all put together. So if you're a dev and you want to build on one of the best foundations in crypto or you're a user looking to claim some ownership on Mantle's defy apps, click the link in the show notes. So getting started

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I just chat GPT to how much gold there is in an iPhone, and it's roughly 0.034 grams, which comes about to $2.33. So there's $2.33 of gold in an iPhone. Okay. How much Bitcoin is in that iPhone? Okay, fair point. It depends on the iPhone. It depends on the iPhone. And you know what? When the price of gold goes up 10 times, there'll be $23 with a goal with it. What about the possibility that via technology we are able to come up with, for whatever reasons we are using gold in our devices, that we find new technologies to use a cheaper commodity, a cheaper material to do that same job that gold is doing without having done any research. I would imagine that that has been the arc that technology has produced. It produces solutions that are cheaper than the previous solution. So if gold and D does go up 10x and there is now $24 instead of $2.4, doesn't that just incentivize us to use even less gold and find ways around the end? If they can, of course, remember, I don't think gold will always be a part of industry.

Remember, other metals are going up too, right? It's not just gold. But yes, I mean, to the extent that they can substitute something. But sometimes they can't. You know, there was a big giant telescope they sent up to space. and it had these huge mirrors around the telescope, and they coated them all with gold. James Webb Telescope, right? And very expensive to coat these huge mirrors with gold. Why didn't they go for something cheaper? Because it wasn't going to work.

They needed the gold. And believe me, even if the price of gold goes up tenfold, it's still such a small part of that iPhone. You think they're going to say, ah, you know, we can't afford this $24 worth of gold in our $1,200 iPhone. You know, it's still not nearly expensive enough to warrant substitution. Because if they said, look, you know, we got to charge you extra $20 on your iPhone because, you know, gold went up.

You're not going to not buy it. So it'd have to go up so much more before those kind of use cases. But there's probably other use cases where the gold is a bigger portion. Look, if gold went up 10fold, they'd make a lot less gold jewelry. I mean, you know, they wouldn't make as much 18-carat. 14-carat. I mean, yeah, because people couldn't afford to buy it anymore. I mean, rich people, sure, if you were really rich, you can still get all gold jewelry. But if you're not so rich, you might not be able to buy. In fact, I think if the price of gold goes up enough,

a lot of people are going to take their jewelry to a pawn shop and sell it because they're going to need the money, right? And that's going to happen as gold prices go up. People will find gold that they don't need anymore and they'll turn it into cash. So that's going to happen. But the only thing that would really change it is if somehow the computer is so smart that it could just make gold, you know, out of thin air. I just somehow concoct it into existence. But if it can do that, it can concoct anything and nobody's going to need any money. We're all be rich, right? That'll be the end of everything, right? Because nobody will need to work. Nobody will need any money. So nobody will need gold. We'll be able to have whatever we want because we'll be able to magically create it out of the atmosphere just by asking for it.

But, you know, I don't know when that day is going to come. So, Peter, you take a very dim view on Bitcoin and crypto. I understand that. You're also, though, a libertarian, right? So are you comfortable with just the free market letting these monetary experiments play out? Or like, would you go as far? It's a pyramid scheme. Should governments make it illegal? Bitcoin illegal, crypto illegal. Do you think that they should do that? No, of course not. I mean, look, people have a right to do whatever they want with their money, including losing it, throwing it away, right? I believe people have a right to gamble. I wouldn't outlaw, you know, sports betting or, you know, blackjack or poker, right? But what I do think should be illegal, and it already is, is fraud. And so to the extent that there are some companies out

there that are defrauding people that are making misrepresentations about Bitcoin, and people end up losing money because they were lied to, I think that, you know, they should be able to, you know, bring these actions in court, and they will. I think that a lot of people are going to end up getting sued over Bitcoin. I think there's a lot of people who haven't disclosed a lot of conflicts of interest, especially these financial networks that, you know, are really just infomercials for Bitcoin who are being paid to promote Bitcoin and how they screen their guests to make sure that nobody is really critical of Bitcoin. And they put on like all these people to promote it, because that's what the advertise. I think there's going to be a lot of people who end up,

you know, looking for some kind of a redress who were really, you know, sold a bill of goods. But, you know, caveat emptier, to a large degree, you know, people who lose money are going to be responsible for their losses. And, you know, I don't think the government should get involved. Now, I don't like all this anti-money laundering stuff. I think it's over the top what they do. I think it's an invasion of privacy. And it's not because I want to protect criminals. It's because I want to protect law-abiding citizens from government.

I don't want government to be so intrusive. And I don't want the government to know everything about us because the more the government knows about us, the more life. likely they will become a totalitarian type government because we enable it. We make it a lot easier for the government to control the people as the people lose all their privacy and they know everything about us. So I don't think that these rules, I don't like these rules being applied to Bitcoin, but I don't like them being applied to banking. I don't like them being applied to other transactions. But clearly, you know, they're going to apply all these AML and KYC and other rules. They're going to be applied to Bitcoin because they're already applied. So I object to it

in general, not just against Bitcoin. I don't think Bitcoin is a security, but who knows, maybe one day they'll change their mind and say it is a security. A lot of the tokens, to me, look like they are securities, even under the way the government defines them legitimately with the Howie test. But, you know, there's going to be a lot more regulation on Bitcoin. I mean, there's more regulation on everything. And that, again, just further undermines the use case. You know, when I first learned about Bitcoin, which was a long time ago, and I would be a lot richer today if I'd only bought it. I did contemplate buying it. I ended up not doing it. But when it was originally presented to me, it was all, hey, this is anonymous. This lets you get around

all the government rules and regulations, you know, all the sensors so you can use it to buy things you're not supposed to buy. And you can be anonymous on the internet and you can transact. And that was like one of the good things about it. And yeah, it was decentralized. You self-custody it. you can use it to buy things. It's very cheap because way back when I heard about it, yeah, I mean, it was very cheap to send your Bitcoin because hardly anybody was using the network. So it wasn't very congested, right? So all those things that I actually liked about it, it doesn't even have anymore. But the reason I ultimately didn't buy it was because I said, you know, it's not real. It can't work. I said, what's to stop somebody from coming up with

another cryptocurrency? And, well, nothing. It's open sourced. Anybody can copy it and make another one. And because at the time I knew about Bitcoin, that's all there was was Bitcoin. They didn't have all these other all coins. But now they're exactly what I was concerned about happening happened. But I remember thinking like, you know, this could catch on. I mean, people could confuse this with gold. I mean, you know, it's got these interesting characteristics. And, you know, I just didn't perceive at that time, obviously, that, you know, it could grow to the scale that it has. And, you know, this many people would get. involved, that Wall Street would get involved. And by the time they kind of did, right, when I first started

noticing that, hey, this was more popular, is in 2017 when it went up to 1,000. And then, you know, it pulled back down, you know, 200, and I remember thinking about it then because then I had some other friends, some hedge fund guys. I knew people that were buying it. I was like, hell, these are smart people that are buying it. I said, maybe, you know, probably going to go up. The chart, it looks like it's forming a base. And I thought about buying it again, just for a chart. And I thought about buying it again, just for a trade. I didn't believe in it, but I thought it would probably go up because enough people were buying it. But I was like, you know what? I didn't want to buy it at a dollar or whatever, so I'm not paying 300 or whatever the hell it was. You know, whatever I first thought about it.

And so I didn't buy it then either. But I don't even consider buying it now. It's not even like something that I would contemplate as a trade. And that hasn't been the case for a while because it's now so popular, so widespread, that the upside is gone. I mean, even if I thought Bitcoin could go to $100,000, which it still hasn't done, right? But even if I've been going to go to $100,000 or $200,000, so what? It's at almost $60,000. There's not enough upside to make it interesting relative to the risk that it collapses. I would much rather put my spec money in these gold mining stocks where I think they can go up 20x, 50x.

Yeah, they might go down 50, 60, 70%, they might. But there's so much upside relative to the downside, that's the bet I want to make, not Bitcoin. Yeah, there was a lot of upside in Bitcoin way back when. I didn't appreciate how much initially. I didn't realize that this many people would be this dumb, but I was wrong.

Once again, I overestimate the intelligence of the average investor. But, you know, the people who didn't get in, and I think that's where the big money got in when it was 300, 400, 400. 500 back then. I think some big money got in, and then they spent a lot of money hyping it up, and they did an excellent job of promoting the hell out of it. Peter, I want to get us back onto some foundation that I know we share. And I actually kind of want to just like dive straight into this one. Should we abolish the Federal Reserve? And if so, why?

Well, I mean, it's a good question. And my answer is it depends. It depends on what we're going to replace it with. So if we abolish the Federal Reserve and replace it with nothing, we go back to what we had before the Federal Reserve, I'm all for it, right? What we had before the Federal Reserve is a bunch of regional banks? Yeah, they were privately owned banks that issued paper currency back by gold, you know, and there was no one, there was no one bank that was, you know, sanctioned above any others. It was all free market competition. It was real capitalism before the Fed was introduced. And even in the early years of the Fed. You know, up until the 1920s, it did a pretty good job, right? It kind of went off the

rails in the 1920s. But initially, the initial time, you know, it was okay. And the initial Federal Reserve charter, when they launched the Federal Reserve, all Federal Reserve notes had had to be backed by gold, 40 percent gold. They had to be backed 100 percent by commercial paper. So they would read discount commercial paper of other banks, and then they had to back it by gold, which meant that the Federal Reserve notes were actually superior to most of the the notes that circulated before the Fed. And the Federal Reserve was not allowed to buy any government bonds. Not only couldn't buy government bonds, it couldn't even own government bonds on their balance sheet. They were prohibited from owning government bonds. So that kind of Fed was not that bad.

But the problem is it's the camel's nose under the tent. Once they got that Federal Reserve, it didn't take long before they completely change it, just like the income tax. We got the income tax in the same year. It was supposed to be a tiny tax, one, two, three, top, was 4% on the millionaires and billionaires. You know, the average person was never conceived to be paying the income tax. Now the average person pays a much higher rate than the billionaires paid back then. And so it's always a bait and switch, Camels knows under the tent. So if we can go back to what we had before the Fed, yeah, we definitely want to abolish it.

The problem would be abolishing the Fed and just handing the printing press over to the Congress and say, hey, there's no more Fed. you guys print the money yourself. Because they would be even worse than the Fed. So, Peter, if you were president, what would your economic policy be? What would you want to see done? Well, I would want to undo things. I mean, that's, you know, I ran for Senate at one time. I didn't win, obviously. But I said, look, I'm not going to do anything. I'm just going to undo everything. That's all I wanted to do. I didn't want to pass any new laws. I just wanted to repeal the laws that already existed. I guess every time I repeal the law, I would restore some freedom that the law took away.

So I would just want to eliminate as much government as I possibly could, get rid of as many agencies and departments that never should have been established in the first place, that have done much more harm than good, if they've done any good at all. But I would try to restore the Constitution and the original premise on which it was based, which was a very limited federal government where the powers are few and defined. I would want the government to live within the confines of the Constitution. And I would level with the American public about the entitlements and say, look, you know, we're going to get rid of Social Security. We're going to get rid of Medicare, Medicaid, all this stuff, right?

You know, it's unconstitutional. It's been a disaster. You know, Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, too, just run by the government, as opposed to the private sector. And that makes it even worse, because it means that people are forced to participate in a Ponzi scheme, which guarantees even more people end up losing. But I would try to figure out the best way. to take care of people temporarily who, because of Social Security, are in financial situations that absent Social Security, they would not be in. I mean, if people weren't taxed their whole life by the government and told that Social Security is going to take care of you, they would have taken care of themselves. They would have saved for their own retirement. So we now have

so many people that are dependent on government because the government created that dependency by creating a program. So I recognize that you just can't take Social Security away from everybody. So we have to have a way of means testing a new program, right, a welfare-type program where we either buy people an annuity or find some way to take care of the most needy. But people who are wealthy, and I don't want to base it on your income because I don't want to discourage people from working. But if you have wealth, if you have property, if you have stock portfolio, then you don't get the Social Security. Just, you know, live off, sell your stocks. You know, I'm not going to subsidize your children's inheritance, right? I'm not going to make poor people,

you know, subsidize the inheritance of wealthy people. But we got to level with the public and get rid of these entitlements, you know, get the government out of banking, get the government out of education, get the government out of health care. Not because I don't value health care or education. I value them a lot. That's why I want the government to get the hell out of the way. I want the free market to be in charge of my health care, to be in charge of, you know, my kids' education. Just like I don't want the government growing my food, right? We have private industry. We have farmers.

You know, the government doesn't make my clothes. They don't have government clothing shops, right? I can't be naked. I need to be clothed, but I don't depend on the government for my clothes. Consumer electronics, you think, does the government make all the tech? No. That's why tech is such a good industry because the government's not involved in it, right, the way they are in health care and education.

They screwed those things up. So we've got to get the government out of all this stuff. I would also default on the national debt because there's no way it could be paid, right? I would be honest and I would tell the creditors, look, you loaned us $35 trillion and we're broke. And there's no way we're going to pay it back because I would get rid of the Fed and replace it with nothing, in which case interest rates would go way up. Let's say interest rates went up to 10%. Well, we can't pay 10% a year on $35 trillion.

We'd destroy the country. So, and just like I ask people, you're not going to get your social. security, you're not going to get your government pension, right, or you're going to get a fraction of it. I would tell the creditors, you're not going to get a hundred cents on a dollar. The American public doesn't have it, and you were dumb to lend it to this in the first place. So look, you know, there's going to be losses, and I'm not insensitive to the fact that people are going to lose money, but if we stay on the current course, more people are going to lose even more money. Not that they're going to lose their money. Their money is going to lose

of value, and that's what's worse, right? So I'd rather lose half my money than not lose any of my money, but my money loses 90% of his value. That's worse, right? So I would make all the reforms that need to be made and, you know, basically swallow the bitter-tasting medicine that will heal the economy and put it in a space where it can legitimately grow in the future. Whether I could get any of that pass through Congress, I mean, what I would probably have to be. I would probably have to be a lot of to do if I was president? See, I would veto everything. So no budget would be passed. I would veto everything. And so the only way that they could avoid this government shutdown and avoid cutting spending would be to override my veto. So all I would need would be like one third of the

House or the Senate to stand with me. And then we could do all this good stuff, right? They'd have to have the guts to say, yep, we're not going to override shifts veto. And then they have to cut. They have to slash the budget because they can't keep, I wouldn't sign the bill to raise the debt ceiling. That's it. That's the ceiling. It's not going up. So now we got to deal with the debt. That's why, you know, I always laugh every time they have these debt ceiling debates. And they say, look, you know, America always pays our bills. We need to raise the debt ceiling. No, if we paid our bills, we wouldn't have any debt. We have to raise the debt ceiling because we never pay our bills. And we want to keep not paying our bills. And so we have to raise the debt ceiling so we can keep on not

paying. The only responsible thing to do is leave the ceiling where it is. In fact, that's another thing. When they initially allowed the Federal Reserve to buy government bonds, it was during World War I. And at the same time, that's when they imposed their first debt ceiling because they were worried that if they let the Fed buy government bonds, the government would sell too many bonds and there'd be too much debt. So they put in a debt ceiling. But they forgot that Congress could raise it. That was the problem. They forgot about that one little fact. And it was like, like a ceiling and name only, right? But that's why we even have it. Okay, let's get into the world of equities in the stock market. So is the stock market overpriced, underpriced, or fairly priced?

Well, it's clearly overpriced. That doesn't mean it's going to go way down because they can print too much money and then it's going to go up in nominal terms. But in terms of gold, the stock market is going to come down a lot. There's no doubt in my mind that that's going to happen. If you take a look at gold, there's real money. And you look at what is the price of the stock market in real money, and what is that price going to be in the future? It's going to be a lot lower. Now, it could be with the stock market going up, just not as much as gold. As I've said, in the last 23 years, you know, that's when this century started, the Dow is up fourfold and gold is up eightfold. So in terms of gold, the Dow is down 50 percent in over 20 years. So,

you know, that's a decline. I think that's going to continue. And I think it's going to accelerate. So, you know, I think the market has a long way to go down. Tech stocks have even bigger to go. You know, not that I'm not optimistic on technology. I mean, I'm very optimistic on the future of technology. I mean, how can you not be? But the markets always get ahead of, you know, where things are. And a lot of optimism gets priced in.

You have a lot of people that have piled into the MAG 7 or not even 7 anymore. How many are left that are still magnificent. But, you know, I mean, it's a crowded, that crowded trade. and so we're going to get a washout. But, you know, the Fed is going to print a lot of money. So it's a moving target, you know, because it's like if I was going to measure my height, but I didn't know how big the ruler was going to be. You know, if you could keep shrinking the ruler, you know, I can be seven foot tall. Doesn't mean I can dunk the basketball because I'm still the same height. But the ruler is smaller. And so if you make money smaller and now you measure your stock portfolio,

going to look like it's a bigger portfolio, but it's not. You just change the way you measure it. Gold is constant. Gold can't be changed by government. An ounce of gold is an ounce of gold. And so there, you know, it's legitimate. And you're going to see prices go down. And they're going to go down a lot because not only is the market way overpriced in terms of gold, but we have a serious economic crisis in our future because we got to pay the Piper for all this debt and the serial bubble blowing. The economy is completely dysfunctional. You know, look at the most recent economic data. We have record low savings in this country, record high consumer debt, credit card debt, corporate debt, government debt, you name it, record high debt. We have a massive collapse of the commercial

real estate market. We have an insolvent banking system where they've lost money on every mortgage. They've written, every commercial mortgage, every residential mortgage is a disaster. We just had the worst merchandise trade deficit in one month in history. We just had, with the exception of the first four months of 2022, which were an aberration because that's when we reopened the economy from the pandemic and we had a backlog of goods that came shipped in. But we have our trade deficits are skyrocketing. Our budget deficits, you know, the national debt is almost 35.3 trillion. It's rising at a rate above three trillion a year. Interest is now the third largest line item on the federal budget. We're spending over a trillion a year just on

interest on the debt. Within another year or two, interest expense will be higher than Social Security or Medicare. It'll be the number one thing that the government spends money on. You know, at some point, all of our tax revenue is going to go just to pay interest on the debt, which is an impossible point to get to. We're going to have to have a collapse before it gets that bad. I can't imagine our creditors being dumb enough to allow that, although, again, I've overestimated the intelligence of investors in the past, right, like I did with Bitcoin. And, You know, they've already gone along with this longer than they should have. But the move to de-dollarize has already started. You can see that, you know, the brick nations, these countries

are not holding as many dollars. They're trying to get out of dollars. They're buying gold. That's where the gold buying is coming from is coming from central banks other than industry because retail investors haven't been buying. I mean, they've been selling gold. There were net redemptions coming out of gold DTFs all year. I'm not sure if that stopped yet. But, you know, retail investors have been selling their gold, right? They don't have confidence in it. They have confidence in Nvidia. That's what they're buying, or they're buying Bitcoin. They weren't buying any gold. And so, gold is cheap. Stocks are expensive. And we're going to have a real financial crisis. I mean, the real crash is something that I wrote about in my 2013 book. And we haven't had it yet.

You know, when I wrote my first book, Crash Proof in 07, and then we got the financial crisis in 2008, a lot of people thought that, ah, you were right. You know, you wrote about an economic collapse. had it. And I had to write my other book to remind people that the crash that I predicted hadn't happened yet. That yes, I did predict the collapse of the real estate market and the financial crisis, but that wasn't the economic crash. That was supposed to come next. That hasn't happened yet. It still hasn't happened. But all the ingredients are there. It's going to happen. In fact, it's going to happen worse than had it happened 10 years ago because all the problems that I pointed out back then are worse now. It's not like any of them got solved.

They're all worse. And they got worse because we succeeded in postponing the pain. We kicked the can down the road, but that just allowed the problems to get bigger. So now we have even more debt. We have an even bigger bubble. So the economy is even more screwed up with more misallocations of resources and malinvestments and stuff like that. And so the market now has a bigger mess to fix. And so that means, you know, it's worse.

So it's a more painful crisis. More people are going to lose even more money. And I think my strategy, I'll end up making even more money. Hopefully I get to keep it. You know, I mean, I'm living here in Puerto Rico, so at least I'm exempt from income tax and the capital gains tax. But who knows, you know, I mean, I've got about as much tax certainty as I guess you could have, but it's never certain because who knows.

So on that, it sounds like you don't okay, Peter. So let's talk about the average listener. What kind of principles for growing wealth do you live by? I mean, growing wealth is pretty important in order to achieve financial freedom, get out of the kind of the wage slave status. How does someone grow their wealth? Like, what advice do you give to them? Well, the best way to grow your wealth is to start a successful business. You know, although, you know, when you start a business, you know, I comment, you know, we had Labor Day this last weekend and everybody wants to celebrate, you know, the worker, right?

And yeah, like, I've got nothing against people who do a hard day work. I mean, that's great, right? But, you know, the unsung heroes are not the workers, but the people who employ them. You know, the entrepreneur is the real hero of capitalism. I mean, anybody can show up and collect a paycheck. Yeah, you know, you've got to do the work that you're assigned and you've got to use the tools that you're provided. But what's harder is to figure out what everybody's going to do and provide them with the tools and take the risks, right, and do it all on the come. When you get a job, you get a salary to do a job. And you collect that salary, whether the company makes a profit or not, you got to get paid. The entrepreneur only gets paid if there's money left over. And if there's no money left over,

he doesn't get paid. In fact, if there's a negative balance, he's got to fund it. He's got to come up with the loss. Or maybe he mortgages his house or does something. But you can make a lot more money owning your own business than as an employee for somebody else. Because as long as you're an employee, you're an expense. And so businesses try to minimize their expensive. So there's only so much. Now, if you're like a commission salesman, you kind of can make more if you sell more. But generally, you know, you're working for a wage and there's, you know, is a cap. Maybe you'll get a bonus. But if you really want to make a lot of money, you start a business. And if you can make it successful, then you can relax. You don't have to work as hard after you succeed. You have to work very

hard. The hardest workers are the business owners. They work harder than anybody they work for. I remember when I started my business initially, I was the first person there in the morning and the person to leave at night. Nobody worked harder than me. And for the first couple years, I didn't make any money. I was the only one not making money. You know, I'm more different than there's stories like this everywhere. So that's the best way to get a lot of money is to start a big business and grow it. Because then your business can earn money and you don't have to work as hard, right? I don't work as hard, you know, as I did when I started. I take more time off now than I did then. And I, you know, I make more money now than I did then.

And it's also important, you know, to try to find a business that you like, right? Don't try to get into a business that doesn't excite you, that doesn't interest you. Because you're going to have to devote so much time to it that you better enjoy it, right? You better have like some passion for what you're doing. And if you do feel good about what you're doing, it'll be easier to devote the type of time to it that you need. You don't want to be, you know, doing something that you hate. So, you know, hopefully you can find something you like that you're good at that you can devote time to. And then, you know, pursue it and, you know, work your butt off and, you know, overcome the obstacles that are in your path because there'll be many of them.

And learn from your mistakes because you're going to make a bunch of them, right? And then, you know, to the extent that you're investing, invest wisely, you know, don't jump on a bandwagon, you know, be a contrarian and be patient and you'll make money. You know, that's the Warren Buffett strategy, which is interesting because, you know, Warren Buffett has been a big seller of stocks as of late. He should be buying gold instead of hoarding cash. So we'll see if he does that. Oh, he'll never do that. I'll never buy gold. No, no. Warren Buffett criticizes gold as an investment. And I agree. It's not an investment. It's money. And I think that if you asked Warren Buffett, if you're going to put, you know, a million dollars into a safety deposit box and come back in five or ten years, would you want to put dollar bills or gold bars? He would put gold bars in there. So he realizes that gold is a better store of value. But, you know, he would rather invest in a business that's growing and earning money and paying dividends than just own a metal. And under normal circumstances, of course, that's always going to be the case. But right now, I think that those businesses that are publicly traded are just very expensive, which is why Buffett has been selling them, not buying them. And I think gold is

very inexpensive. And so if Buffett thinks stocks are too expensive to buy, he should sell them, but not hold the dollars. He should hold gold instead. Because if he's waiting for bargains, the bargains are going to be much bigger if you can buy stuff with gold as opposed to dollars. All right, Peter, this has been great. Glad to have you on. As we close this out, maybe I'm going to ask the most challenging question of the podcast. So you spent a lot of time today, basically talking about Bitcoin being sort of a malinvestment, just like not a good idea, pyramid scheme, all of these things.

I want you to do the opposite as we closed. This is why I said it was challenging because I know you don't think this. But can you steal man the case for Bitcoin and crypto for listeners today? What is the most compelling piece of the story that you've heard? And if you were asked to steal man it,

give the best possible case, what would you say? Well, the only compelling argument to it is that it is possible that there's another wave of buying. you know, you have the ETS that are out there. You know, they're trying to pressure Trump to the extent that he becomes president. And I hope he does because he's better than the alternative. You know, will Trump, you know, will they be able to succeed in getting the U.S. government to buy Bitcoin? I mean, I hope they don't buy Bitcoin. Couldn't do it. You know, it's the last thing we need to do

is print more money to buy Bitcoin. But to the extent that some of these things happen, and I know there's going to be very high inflation, I know we're going to have a dollar crisis. People are going to be looking for alternatives to the dollar, to the euro, to the yen. And it's possible that people might take refuge in Bitcoin. And given the fact that there's 21 million of them, or 2.1 quadrillion Satoshi's, but we don't need to get into that, but whatever, 21 million Bitcoin, if enough people who own Bitcoin don't sell and you get enough money, coming in, yeah, the price could move up. As I said, it could move up to 100,000, 200,000, 300,000. It could happen. And you could sell it at those prices. Now, most people won't. I mean, if Bitcoin does

go to a couple hundred thousand, most of you hoddlers will, oh, wow, yeah, diamond hands. I'm not selling, right? I'm taking it to the grave. And so most of you will just ride it up and ride it down. But there may be the opportunity. But again, I think there's as much, if you're not, if you're if not more upside in other speculative assets that have real fundamental value that I think have a much lower chance of crashing than Bitcoin. So even though I concede that it's possible that the circumstances that are going to unfold with inflation and the dollar and all this stuff could result in another wave into Bitcoin, I just don't think it's worth betting on it. And it's also, you've got to ask yourself, why hasn't it already happened? Like, what's

stopping it. Why isn't Bitcoin, I mean, when the Bitcoin ETFs were launched in January, you go back and you look at what everybody was saying about where Bitcoin would be by now, you know, way higher. I mean, Bitcoin is still up this year, but only for the first two months. All the gains that Bitcoin has had in 2024 were in January and February. Since the end of February, it's gone down, maybe about 10%, so maybe close to that. Well, gold's gone up. 22%, 23%, so you got to ask, why is this happening? I mean, does this mean, despite all this buying? And what I'm concerned about, too, is what happens when the ETF buyers become sellers, because they haven't been. They've been buying, they've been riding it out, they've been buying the dips,

but they've only been doing this for eight months, right? They're not, you know, true believers. they waited until 2024 to buy their first Bitcoin, a lot of them, and they didn't even buy it the right way. They bought it through an ETF. So they're purely speculating on the price, right? When you buy a Bitcoin ETF, all you're doing is buying it because you think the price is going to go up. There's no other reason. It's not like you can do anything else with it because it's inside an ETF in your brokerage account. So you can't give it to somebody else, right? It's stuck. All you can do is sell it. You can't transfer it. You can't sneak it out of the country. It's not self-custody. They're not your keys. So it's just people that are buying as a gamble, just like they would buy a biotech stock or,

you know, anything. And at some point, they're going to be disappointed. They were promised a big gain on their Bitcoin. And so far, most people in the Bitcoin ETFs are losing money. And at some point, they're going to lose enough money that they're going to call it quits. They're going to sell. And I just don't think that's possible. I just don't think that's possible. I just don't think there's enough real buying in the spot market to allow that to happen. I mean, there was plenty of sellers in the spot market that sold their Bitcoin to these ETF buyers. That's why the ETFs have all this Bitcoin, because people sold it to them. But I don't think those same people are going to want to buy it back. And I think they're happy they got rid of it. The last thing they

do is want that hot potato back. And so all of a sudden, there's going to be all this selling and the market's going to implode. It's going to be the biggest Bitcoin crash we've ever seen. And, you know, in prior Bitcoin crashes, what has saved the day was tether. All of a sudden, a bunch of tethers come in. They create a bunch of tethers and they buy Bitcoin. It kind of like stops the decline. Well, that won't work if the selling is coming from an ETF because the ETFs can't take tether.

They need dollars because they have to put the dollars in their customers' brokerage accounts. They can't say, well, we didn't get any dollars. We're going to give you some tether. that they have to give them the actual cash in their accounts that day, right? It's market, right? If I own a Bitcoin ETF and I just, I put the sell, I hit sell, the ETF, the ETF has to sell those Bitcoin that day. They have to put cash in my account that day. And so if there's no bids, well, they just got to hit whatever bids are there. They can't say, well, we didn't sell because there really wasn't anybody there. Well, the price has to keep coming down until there is somebody there.

right? Because they just hit sell. Because it's not like when Grayscale was a closed-end trust, it didn't matter, right? If people dumped Grayscale, it just went down. It didn't affect Bitcoin. That's why Grayscale, as a closed-end trust, got to a 50% discount because people wanted out, and so it traded a discount. But none of those Bitcoin ever got sold. They were just trapped in Grayscale. But now that everybody owns the ETS, every time they sell, those Bitcoin now go, back to the actual market and they have to find an actual buyer. Well, when all the people who own the ETFs are selling, who's going to be buying? You know, so it's just going to be just like a trapdoor. And it's just going to be a crash. And then, you know, people have borrowed money to buy Bitcoin,

margin calls. I mean, it's just, you know, it's going to be a bloodbath, right? And that's coming. Yeah. And I'm sure, you know, wherever Bitcoin bottoms out, you know, it'll probably rise. it's not going to just go straight down. I mean, there'll be rallies. I mean, dead cats bounce, right? So Bitcoin can drop to 10,000 or 5,000 on ETF liquidation, and then it can bounce to 15 or 20,000, you know, after everybody gets flushed out. But then it'll go down again, you know. So it's just not for me. You know, I don't want to play in that casino. There's other risk-reward situations that are a lot better. do I wish I had taken a position when I first heard about it, of course. You know, and people try to make it out like, ah, you see, Peter, regrets not buying Bitcoin.

Well, yeah, I mean, I'm not an idiot. I mean, everybody who bought Bitcoin regrets not buying more, right? I mean, everybody's like, I should have bought more of it when I first heard about it, right? Everybody, because with the benefit of hindsight, yeah, there are a lot of things. I should have loaded up on Nvidia 10 years ago, whatever, you know. You know, I remember what I didn't like it because it was, I thought, well, you know, they're making all this stuff for the crypto miners. right? That's a fad. But, you know, there are a lot of stocks that I could have bought that I didn't

buy, and with the benefit of hindsight, I wish I bought them, you know. But there are a lot of stocks that I did buy that did really well. And I think there are some that I own that will do really well. And, of course, I don't have benefit of hindsight with these. I'm trying to figure it out with foresight. But, you know, people who are buying into these things now, you're not, you know, people think, oh, I'm getting it on the ground floor buying Bitcoin. You're not getting it on the ground floor. I mean, you're not even close to the ground floor, right, when so many people know about it and talk about it and hype it up. I mean, there was just this Bitcoin convention. In fact, I ran into the guy at a party here a couple weeks ago in Puerto Rico who threw that convention,

Bitcoin Magazine guy, CEO. Dave Bailey, yeah. And, you know, he had over 20,000 people at his convention. And I'm like, you know, I go to these gold conventions every year. The one that I go to the oldest, the biggest retail gold convention in the U.S. is in New Orleans every year. And, you know, They get like 500 people. That's like the big granddaddy of the gold conferences. Five hundred people. Guys got 20,000 people at his conference. And he's got presidential candidates talking there. I mean, all these big, I mean, they're not coming to the gold conferences. So when you see something like that, you know, that's like, you know, during the housing bubble, if you haven't seen my mortgage banker speech from 2006, you know, I went to this conference of mortgage bankers in 05 and 06, you know, at the peak of the housing. bubble. And they had a big extravagant conference with, you know, all kinds of frills. I had, like, you know, tigers there and, you know, all kinds of like crazy things. And I remember pointing out, like, look, this is obviously the top of this mortgage bubble, housing bubble, that you guys can afford this elaborate conference. I mean, this doesn't happen at market bottoms. This happens

at market tops where you have this kind of excitement and money just thrown around. And, you know, that's what you had at this Nashville Bitcoin conference. conference. So it's, you know, when you're on the top, you got no place to go but down. You know, so I think that's where it's headed. Well, Peter, I'm not sure how many people you convinced in the bankless nation, but you certainly made the case. We appreciate it. Hopefully we convinced some. You know, at least, you know what, at least hedge your best. You know, hey, acknowledge that I could be right. Right. I mean, maybe I'm not crazy old man. I could be right. Take something off the top, you know, sell some Bitcoin. Don't let it all ride, right? Like, you know, you know, you

Don't leave it all on black and keep spinning the wheel. Take some of the chips off the table. Put them in your pocket, right? Play with the house's money, right? You know, whatever. And then take that money. Buy real investments. Buy gold.

Buy silver. Buy stocks. Pay dividends. Maybe buy yourself some income producing real estate. Do something. And even if I'm wrong and Bitcoin goes to a million or whatever Michael Saylor says, 30 million, I don't know, what a crazy number he pulled out of his butt. But you'll still be rich.

even if you have half as many Bitcoin, you'll still have twice as many, actually not twice as many, infinitely more than I do. So you'll still have plenty of Bitcoin if you sell half your Bitcoin now or whatever you're going to do. But if I'm right and you haven't sold anything, you're broke. Right. So you don't want to be broke. You don't want to have to start from zero because you've lost everything and missed out on some of these opportunities. I mean, I could be right. What if gold stocks do go up 10 times, 20 times, 50 times, and Bitcoin collapses? Not only have you lost all this money in Bitcoin, but you missed out on the opportunity to make that money. So, you know, put a little money there too.

Cover your bets, right? I'm so confident that Bitcoin's not going to go anywhere that I don't even bother to gamble on it. But if you own it, you have to perceive that there's a good chance that you're wrong. You might be right, but there's a decent chance that you're wrong. So invest based on that chance that you're wrong. And in fact, at Shift Gold, I know we make it easy because we work with this company called BitPay. We're probably one of the first companies to start working with BitPay. But you can go on Shift Gold and using BitPay, you can actually buy your gold directly with your Bitcoin in the same transaction.

So you can get rid of Fool's Gold and buy the real thing. Wow. Peter Schiff trying to vampire attack us right now on the bank list. No, I'm trying to help you guys out. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the help. I'm doing my good deed. You certainly made the case. I think we're going to have to check back in a thousand years and see what the monetary year. It's not going to take that long. Check back next year. We'll definitely check back with you. Peter, thank you so much for coming on bankless today. My pleasure. Got to end with this. Of course, none of this has been financial advice. You know, crypto is risky. So is gold. Or maybe not. According to Peter, you could lose what you put in, but we're headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.