On December 4 2025, Peter Schiff joined Changpeng Zhao on the stage at the Binance Blockchain Week event in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The subject of their debate was to be, as you might expect, gold vs. bitcoin. If you don't know, Schiff is a stock broker and commentator who owns SchiffGold, a precious metals dealer specializing in gold and silver. Changpeng Zhao, also known as CZ, is a co-founder of Blockchain.com and Binance, a crypto exchange he founded and served as the CEO until 2023. In short, a gold-maxi versus a bitcoin-maxi.

This was an event that I personally was looking forward to, like a pay-per-view HBO boxing match back in the day.

Schiff has been a critic of bitcoin, ever since 2015. If you ever heard any of his arguments against it, he pretty much restated his same old opinions and arguments at the debate. One point he kept referring to is that gold has outperformed bitcoin over the past year.

But what about looking back to 2015?

Clearly, there is a debate existing among investors too about which is a better store of value. Bitcoin is certainly more volatile, but I would say that both are great as means of a store of value. 

Anyway, getting back to the debate. It was actually a very cordial discussion, more so than a debate in my opinion. I do feel like CZ let Schiff do most of the talking. If you knew nothing about gold and nothing about bitcoin, you would probably think that Schiff won the debate. 

There are two things that Schiff continues to say that I don't agree with:

• Bitcoin is not money
• Bitcoin has no value

If we are to think of money as a medium of exchange for goods or services, then yes...Bitcoin is money. You can buy things with Bitcoin. Many companies partner with BitPay to accept cryptocurrencies from customers as a form of payment.

Now, to this argument, Peter Schiff would say that the company doesn't receive the crypto. The customer pays with their choice of crypto, which then goes to Bitpay. Bitpay then converts the crypto to a fiat currency on behalf of the customer, then pays the company. So, crypto is part of, but not exclusively the medium of transaction. Might be true, might not be. Bitpay actually offers payouts to businesses in crypto:

Hmm, that is very interesting. You know what else is very interesting? SchiffGold accepts bitcoin as payment for gold.

Come on Pedro! Please don't tell us that bitcoin is not money, while your company is accepting it as payment for the gold it is selling. If that's not money then I don't know the definition of money. A peer-to-peer electronic cash system? Sounds like money to me. There are plenty of other examples to point to: JP Morgan accepting BTC as collateral for institutional loans, Mastercard enabling over 1 billion users to spend Bitcoin and crypto...

Finally, on the matter of "bitcoin has no value." Well, Mr. Schiff wants to tokenize physical gold using blockchain technology. He even teases at the end of the event that he wants to partner with CZ to get his gold token listed on Binance! So, that blockchain technology must have some value to him, for he can harness it to digitize the gold he wants to sell: make it easier to transfer, fully redeemable for physical gold, easier to trade. Now, just where did that technology come from? Satoshi Nakamoto brought the concept to life when the Bitcoin Network was launched in 2009.

To me, Peter Schiff wants to say bitcoin isn't money, is worthless, and has no value. But he wants to extract the money it's worth to accept it as payment for gold and he wants to extract the blockchain technology to make it easier to peddle his precious metals. He is mining bitcoin for its most valuable properties: its use as an electronic peer-to-peer cash system and its decentralized immutable public ledger, all in the name of personally profiting from proceeds of gold trading. Mind blown.

Anyway, my opinions aside, I would suggest a watch of the full debate and let me know in the comments below what you think.

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