Part 2
Trust me, you're going to want to read this and following parts. I don't care about selling you on something, but we've been handed a golden nugget, and I'm going to use it for some wonderful debate-ables.
A quick recap: In my first part, I picked at the sound problems. There's no reason Richard's sound should have staggered, and there's absolutely no excuse for not checking and fixing the hot input or bad sound-staging on Schiff's mic.
Next, I point out that Schiff's defense of gold is store of value, and not investment value, and I've got some fun planned here. I analyze Richard Heart finding common ground in framing the argument against Bitcoin for negative environmental reasons, when in truth it is his position to take in promoting Hex, and not a fully sincerely held belief since he was fine with mining when he could play around with it himself in the earlier Bitcoin days, but leaning on Bitcoin's massive mad gainz from the start of its cycles comes and goes depending on where the argument belongs. But, I didn't go into that much, rather focused more on the fact that Richard uses data to frame an argument, the other side doesn't debate it well, and that bugs me.
So, lets take a deeper look at the "gold as a store of value" argument
We should certainly be looking at it, as whether gold and Bitcoin as digital gold, serve the purpose as store of value better than fiat.
The answer, of course, is yes. Any asset that performs better than 97% loss over 20 years is better than fiat. But, that really, genuinely, absolutely, is the best answer that a professional investment advisor is giving. Gold; I like it because it isn't worse than fiat.
Why couldn't the brilliant Richard Heart have done THAT better? Gordon just absolutely killed Schiff's case.
Now, here is the deal. Schiff is a financial advisor. He makes recommendations to people on investment vehicles. His goals are to not lose people money, and to make recommendations or build strategies that DO make people money. There is a responsibility that comes with that. You don't go chasing pie in the sky penny stocks or, in this case, let's say NFTs, because you may pick the right one and your peeps will 1000X. More likely than not, most wild-ride investments are going down to next-to-nothing.
I am fully receptive and sympathetic, even empathetic to Schiff's position. He seeks out shares in stocks that are good to hold over time and earn dividends. Sound financial advice is not about guessing the right pumps, and it IS about finding good, safe assets that perform well over time.
That is the end of my giving credit where credit is due
In the same way that I do not take Peter McCormack seriously for being a professional at not knowing what Bitcoin did, I don't give more-than-deserved credit to Schiff for spending years popping up to poke at Bitcoin's certain demise every time the price drops, while ignoring the exact same thing in gold. "I've guessed a lot of things right, and I've guessed a lot of things wrong", shouldn't be a good position to take in a debate in defense of gold, only to make the strongest argument for gold, that it is better than losing money in the dollar.
Seriously, Richard grabbed a small piece of the argument, but he could have, SHOULD have run to town with that. Why is Gordon a better armchair quarterback debater than Richard who does it as his personal religion?
So, Schiff needs to own the fact that he is seen as the "gold" guy, because he is the one who inserts himself in the controversy, by only pointing out when Bitcoin goes down.
Debating Bitcoin's price-action value does not require manipulated facts. Believing in Bitcoin's financial value based on real metrics proves it's value and acceptance at market not just based on NgU technology, but the fact that it has responded to markets based on people's interest and faith, meaning it is not just pumps, it is not just based on the value provided by new people being tricked into a Ponzi, nor is it antiquated because there are lots of new things popping up.
You can look at Bitcoin's metrics from day/week 1, and it started as literally a thing only valued by the ability to spit out a reward for providing a little gpu power. It was a pump at 1 penny, let alone $1. When it did $10, thousands of people wondered "oh man, should I have sold?" and others in the thousands DID make a killing at $10.
Nobody in Bitcoin, at any one period in time, has any clue whether the next thing that comes along will actually kill it. I maintain that the only real Bitcoin killer is government. Whether they mishandle or manipulate a virus, force us into war, scream about the opposition or intentionally spend us into oblivion, the only thing they are guaranteed never to do, is take credit for personal responsibility. There will always need to be something, or someone else, to blame. When the World Bank and IMF are used as your mechanism for international control of all the world's assets, and small countries are supposed to place themselves into permanent bondage through these demonic organizations, every country like El Salvador will be an ever-mounting red flag that the globalists are losing power, and certainly losing the narrative.
But, as long as those wheels turn the cogs, Bitcoin will be front and center of the blame.
I promise you, and Richard SHOULD be much smarter than he is on this issue, but I PROMISE you, if they take down Bitcoin, which they won't, there will not be a Hex left standing. And that is coming from someone who is NOT anti-Hex OR anti-Richard. I think he designed what he did to serve the purpose that it serves. I think there are a lot safer, smarter, easier ways to scam people than what he has done, and here is my final argument for anyone like Peter McCormack lacking the knowledge to frame their own argument for their position on... well, anything:
Richard is a firm believer in posthumanism, but they frame it as the longevity movement. Sorry guys, but it isn't going to go the way they hope for it to go, but if you view yourself as an atheist realist who has made good business decisions for a long time and can afford to spend the majority of your adult life retired, you place your focus on protecting your future and your health.
The idealist, Richard, imagines a future where health, medicine, technology allow people to evade, and then permanently eliminate the need to die of natural causes. It sounds noble, it plays well to people who don't have a reason from a religious angle to be alarmed, but the point is; Richard certainly doesn't want to extend his life longer for the purpose of spending the rest of it in court! He wants to be rich, and continue getting more rich, so he can live more years in the playpen of life, doing more cool things for people, being adored and helping people make mad gainz, yo. If his goal was to scam tens of thousands of people and then guarantee he could live long enough for every one of them to come after him, then he also wouldn't be smart enough to design something like Hex.
This allows me to seal the deal on any other argument Peter Schiff actually has against Hex, but his capabilities to debate are not any better than the child-like opponents Richard has hosted on his own channel, so I guess I'm not disappointed.
Telling someone that "it's a scam, a Ponzi, a pyramid" is absolutely no better than the random internet visitors I get on this tiny blog platform, and I'm not expected to manage the retirement portfolios for thousands of people. So, why aren't there smarter people?
Back to Bitcoin and Gold as... gold, or store of value.
Being a good store of value is about one thing and one thing only: trust.
A store of value means that you have a good expectation that the thing you trust, will be trustworthy in 10 years, 20 years, at least as long as you live, and if you lived well, something you can pass on to your kids.
Schiff managed to cover that gold was around thousands of years, and that's swell, but I could have managed that one with my failing term paper that only used the wiki as a source. They both talked about a few of the real-world values in gold, but on that point I think we were just rich people chillin' and talking about watches; it lost the sheen of explaining that most people prefer it as jewelry over investing.
What really bugs me here, is Richard knows that the debate was against Schiff, and hardly anyone in our camp is ever going to be able to annoy Schiff enough to get back in to debate them, so this was the thing. Schiff is the gold guy, and he comes into our camp to scream that Bitcoin is going to zero. I don't care if you are a BTC maxi or only in it for the bored ape gainz, you need to have a minimal knowledge and appreciation of Bitcoin to be in the crypto space. Every one of us should be able to defend the idea that Bitcoin as a store of value, as a transactional use for peer-to-peer e-cash, with L2 solutions, are all valid use-cases. If it was failing on any of them, which it is not, that would be another issue.
There are so many weak points in this debate. I was entertained, and this is not a "grade"- this is the post-match analysis where I make the points YOU should know, because there was a big educational opportunity missed, so Gordon is dedicating his weekend to pointing it out.
"No Use Case"
Schiff very, very briefly hit on the "there is no use case" in his flight of fancy rants that there's nothing of value in crypto and it is all going to zero.
How it is possible that Heart didn't wipe the floor with him the moment he stepped out on that floor... actually, the answer is because has made the miscalculation to go against Bitcoin in his case for Hex; it is a grave error.
Sending money that isn't being seized by a bank, to the people of Ukraine, is a use case. In fact, it is a use case for money that is peer-to-peer just as much as a store of value. If you can hide a piece of paper, an encrypted file on a computer, a few words in your head, you can access future wealth that neither Russia NOR Canada can force from you. The real danger is the exact same one that already threatens us; government seizure of funds.
But, gold fails on the exact same front. Governments have regularly confiscated private gold and worse, banned the holding and sale. It may be a great store of value, but when you need it the most, all the government has to do is issue a ban, and banks, jewelers and every on/off ramp will comply. That's why revolutions are exceedingly important. Showing controlled protest to the things we did not sign up for is the way you win, not by bickering about the validity of something that has only gained validity AND profit for 13 years. To call Bitcoin as down 50%, when it is up 1,000,000%, should be enough to get a financial advisor fired based on the principle of math.
I'm going to stop there and continue into Part three, because the flow will benefit thereof.
And, on that note, Crypto Gordon Freeman, for now... out.
