Bitcoin bull and Morgan Creek Digital co-founder Anthony Pompliano faced off against gold bug and CEO of Euro Pacific Capital Peter Schiff on CNBC’s Crypto Trader.
The two debated the future of Bitcoin, with Schiff saying Bitcoin lacks utility and a real-world use case.
“Bitcoin has much more in common with a fiat currency than it does with gold because gold’s value is derived from its physical properties that make it desirable and make it useful. Whereas Bitcoin’s value is derived from the confidence that people are going to want it in the future even though it has no physical properties or any other properties you can use it for…
The problem with Bitcoin and the idea it can be a store of value is it has no value to store. There is nothing you can use Bitcoin for. The value for Bitcoin is completely a function of the confidence that people have that they’ll be able to give it to someone else in the future at a higher price.”
Pompliano countered the point, saying Bitcoin’s cryptographic security and the ability to transact peer-to-peer is what gives Bitcoin its worth as a store of value.
“One of gold’s main uses is a store of value. You buy it, you hold it and what you’re hoping for is that the value that you placed into it or the wealth you placed into it is the same or higher in the future. So that’s the value of a store of value asset. Now the people who hold Bitcoin for a long period of time, they’re using it as a store of value. So it has the exact same use case as gold, and what they’re doing is they’re taking their wealth and they’re putting it into this asset.
It doesn’t have many of the physical properties that gold has, but it has something that gold doesn’t in the cryptographic security. And they’re trusting that that cryptographic security, that feature, is more important to them than the physical aspects. And that’s what goes ahead and stores that value over a long period of time.”
You can check out the full debate below.