Gold or Bitcoin? Peter Schiff, Jack Mallers debate which is ‘better money’

• Mallers defended BTC as ‘better money’ despite Schiff’s disagreement. 
• BTC had more upside potential than gold on the price charts. 

Strike’s Jack Mallers defended Bitcoin [BTC] in a recent debate with Peter Schiff, one of the top crypto critics. There’s been a long-standing argument between gold proponents and their BTC colleagues. 

Which is the ‘better money’ between the two? Is it physical gold or ‘digital gold’ (BTC)? 

According to Mallers, Bitcoin is the ‘best money’ because it checks all the boxes of money properties. He said, 

“BTC is the best money in human history…It’s the scarcest with a fixed supply, most portable, and most divisible…Over the last decade, BTC has had an annual average return of 60%, while Gold had a 2% return over the same duration.” 

Which is better: BTC or gold?

However, Peter Schiff disagreed with Mallers and didn’t view BTC as money. He said, 

“I don’t think BTC qualifies as money. Money must be the most marketable commodity and has value. Bitcoin has none. It is used for exchange and speculation. Apart from that, it’s not used the way money is supposed to be like gold.” 

Schiff acknowledged that BTC has outperformed every asset and commodity in the past decade. However, he noted that gold, especially tokenized gold, was a better alternative to BTC. 

Per Schiff, tokenized gold could be sent faster and cheaper globally than BTC and is a better alternative for a digital monetary system. 

“We could use gold as the basis of the digital monetary system; that is much better than when gold was the basis of a paper monetary system.”

However, unlike BTC, Mallers highlighted gold’s heavy reliance on centralized third-party actors to finalize transactions.

According to Mallers, this limited gold’s scalability in a global economy and led to its demonetization, making it fall short of being an actual global reserve currency. 

He claimed that BTC adoption would have been slow if gold was a solid competitor and world reserve asset.

As a result, he predicted BTC could still hit $250K to $1M in the next 12 to 18 months based on liquidity injection (money inflation) and BTC’s superior technology. 

But Schiff was skeptical of Mallers’ price targets. However, he noted that he would accept his wrong stance on BTC if the asset gained mass adoption and became a top world reserve asset.

Meanwhile, he cautioned against taking speculative bets on BTC, citing that there were better assets with relatively less downside risk. In fact, he recently stated that gold investors saw a 140% gain compared to BTC ETFs after the latest market drawdowns. 

This was true from a short-term perspective. However, from a long-term outlook, Peter Brandt noted that BTC had an upside potential. 

He cited the bullish pattern on the BTC/GLD ratio chart, which could rally BTC by 123% against gold. 

Source: X/Peter Brandt

At the time of writing, BTC was the 10th largest asset by market cap, with a market cap of $1 trillion. In contrast, gold topped the chart with nearly $17 trillion.