There are few rivalries in finance as entertaining as the one between Peter Schiff and Bitcoin. Schiff, a lifelong gold bug, has spent years predicting the demise of Bitcoin, and Bitcoin has spent years proving him wrong, at least so far. Every dip gives Schiff a new reason to gloat, and every rally gives Bitcoin holders a new reason to quote him back at him. In December 2021, a new chapter was added, and this time his opponent was a head of state.
El Salvador President Nayib Bukele explained to Peter Schiff why it didn’t make sense to criticize his country for continuing to take advantage of dips in the Bitcoin price. When a sitting president starts publicly schooling a gold investor on Twitter, you know the debate has left the conference rooms.
🥊 The Exchange
Schiff is the CEO of Euro Pacific Capital, a full-service, registered broker/dealer specializing in foreign markets and securities, and founder and Chairman of SchiffGold. His argument has always been consistent: gold is real money, Bitcoin is a bubble, and any country that adopts it is making a catastrophic mistake. In early December, with Bitcoin pulling back from its November peak, he took aim at El Salvador’s dip buying:
You’re in the green for now. Let’s see how long it lasts. Plus you’re still in the red on the #Bitcoin you bought on last weeks’s dip. You are making a huge bet using other people’s money. It’s not likely to end well for them or you!
~ Peter Schiff (@PeterSchiff) December 4, 2021
🇸🇻 Bukele’s Counter
Bukele did not let the attack sit. El Salvador’s President responded to Schiff’s criticism of his nation’s gold reserves by pointing out that the value of their gold reserves has gone down by 0.37% over the past one year. The response was sharp precisely because it was so simple: the asset Schiff champions was quietly losing value, while the asset he mocks keeps giving the country chances to buy more of it.
The numbers behind the exchange are worth laying out. The last time El Salvador bought Bitcoin was on October 27/28, and if they had done so back then, the price would be around $204 million. Buying during dips is not reckless gambling; it is dollar cost averaging at the national level, a strategy Schiff himself would recognize if it were applied to gold.
📜 The Bitcoin Law Timeline
To understand why this exchange mattered, remember how El Salvador got here. The bill to make Bitcoin legal tender in the country got passed by the Legislative Assembly on June 9, and the Bitcoin Law became effective on September 7. Since then, the country has been steadily accumulating, buying small amounts on a regular schedule, regardless of what the chart looks like on any given day.
That is the thing Schiff consistently refuses to engage with: a nation state with a long term plan does not care about the six month chart. It cares about the decade.
🧠 Final Thoughts
Nobody knows how the El Salvador experiment ends, and honest Bitcoiners will admit the risks of a small economy tying itself to a volatile asset. But on the specific point of the argument, the dip buying, Bukele has both history and arithmetic on his side. Bitcoin has never had a four year period where it ended lower, and every single crash in its history has eventually been followed by new highs.
Schiff will keep making the same prediction, and Bitcoin will keep giving him new data points to ignore. That is the beauty of public debates in crypto: the receipts are on the blockchain forever. Thanks for reading.