Famous gold bug and global economist Peter Schiff has a Bitcoin wallet “moment”

Those who research economics and finance will know the famous Peter Schiff, who runs some particularly big finance firm and handles massive amounts of money for investors. He often appears on economics news channels globally. He is a “gold bug”, a fond term for those who are massive proponents of gold as the best investment in the world. And he may be correct there, but he is also a “nocoiner”, or someone who dislikes cryptocurrency and bitcoin like the plague.

https://twitter.com/PeterSchiff/status/1218911797626847234

My impression is that it was actually no big loss to Peter. He had never bought any bitcoin himself, being intrinsically averse to it. But in his years of negatively dismissing bitcoin he was given a gift once of around $250 worth of BTC, a small sum for a man who rightfully buys and trades large sums of gold, for himself and for others in his investment company. Now gold is a great store of value – perhaps the best historically – and I would highly recommend anyone to invest long term in some gold, like Kruger Rands, from my home country of South Africa, the home of gold on the globe. Our national sports colors are green and gold. South Africa was built on gold mining.

But now we have bitcoin and it is a very new and rather cryptic system for the older generation, so they are risk averse to it. It’s just too new. Even Warren Buffet, the richest man in the financial world potentially, who is the top stock broker on the planet, is also averse to bitcoin and any new technology. That’s why he never ever invested in any tech stocks, like Apple, Microsoft, or whatever. And those tech stocks are today the leaders on the stock market. But Warren was averse to tech all round.

So understandably the #okboomer generation are going to be averse to bitcoin as a store of value, investment or currency. But still, here it is and it is all of those and many have become rich by it or do business around it. So it works and it’s likely here to stay, like the internet. Nevertheless, Peter had a crucial problem with his wallet, and this is a fundamental weak point in the entire cryptocurrency system, and so I initially empathise. I mean we all have passwords to all our online accounts and we know not to forget them. And if we remember them and still the system doesn’t accept them then there is usually an administrative procedure by which the company involved will help you to retrieve your account. It may be trickier with a bitcoin wallet, but it can be done, if you at least remember your original “seed phrase” of about 12 words.

So My Schiff’s solution is to find his seed phrase and present it to admin at blockchain.com where he has the wallet, and they will help him to restore his wallet. He can download it again on another device, for example, using his seed phrase, and it will reinstall with all the bitcoin still in it. And they have even offered to help him to do that, in subsequent tweets. So there is no loss. Bitcoin may be risky to secure, and easy to misplace, but there are security features in place even above the password, a massively long string of alphanumeric symbols impossible to memorize, for most of us.

Despite all this, Mr Schiff has used the situation to still further dismiss bitcoin as a failed system because his wallet isn’t working. Who knows what the real reason is for why his wallet won’t accept his “correct” password. It may be a technical glitch or it may be his human error, but either way, one can get help from the admin.

Why does he bash bitcoin so? Perhaps he sees it as competition to his product – gold – and he doesn’t want to see potential customers lured away from his investment company and into bitcoin, even though you will undoubtedly make far more profit buying and “hodling” bitcoin over the coming two years than gold or anything else on the planet, if the past 11 years of Bitcoin’s price trajectory is anything to go by. It’s as simple as that – he is in team gold and therefore any other team, like bitcoin, is his competitor. Totally understandable.

Nevertheless the debate will rage on as to the pros and cons of bitcoin, when actually both gold and bitcoin are perfect investments, along with silver, and everyone who is serious about investing long term should have some precious metals as well as some bitcoin in their portfolio. Diversify your investments to be sure. Gold is the oldest and bitcoin is the newest on the planet, so they are worlds apart in some people’s eyes, but among millennials the shift is from the older to the newer, while those in between boomer and millennial, like me, appreciate both. Check out the twitterstorm that went viral and notice the interesting comments from celebrities in economics as well as the rest, and you will be humored by the responses as well as enlightened regarding the head space around crypto today.