Opinion
|8 min ReadCZ vs Peter Schiff: 300 Million Crypto Users, Ponzi Or New Money?
Tariq Al-Saidi
Senior Analyst
Published
Jan 16, 2026
When Peter Schiff walks on stage at a Binance conference and says “Bitcoin is a digital tulip,” you know the gloves are coming off.
In Dubai, on the main stage of Binance Blockchain Week, CZ and Schiff sat down for a long, sometimes playful, sometimes brutal debate: Bitcoin versus tokenized gold, speculation versus utility, code-based consensus versus five thousand years of metal.
Schiff came armed with charts and history. CZ came with a one kilo gold bar, a Binance card, and a number he kept repeating: 300 million users.
Tokenized Gold: Schiff’s Pitch For Old Money On New Rails
Schiff started by selling his own product with zero shame. His project, TGold, takes fully allocated, segregated bars and coins stored in a vault and turns them into on-chain claims. Every token represents specific gold that can be redeemed for bars, coins, or shipped out as physical metal.
His analogy is simple. The token is the coat check tag. The gold in the vault is the coat. You can transfer the tag without moving the coat. Ownership transfers instantly. The metal stays safe.
In his view, this is exactly what paper claims did for gold centuries ago. Gold stayed in the vault. Notes circulated as money. The failure came later when governments removed the gold backing and left only paper and promises. Tokenized gold, he argues, brings back that earlier model without the government in the middle.
As money, he says, tokenized gold is strictly better than physical bullion. It is divisible, easy to send, cheaper to store, and still anchored in a scarce commodity used in jewelry, industry and central bank reserves. The token just upgrades gold’s plumbing.
Bitcoin, in contrast, is “like fiat without the state.” It has no industrial demand, no non-monetary use, no physical anchor. Its entire price, he says, comes from people believing that someone else will buy it later at a higher level.
CZ: Bitcoin As Digital Gold 2.0 And Infrastructure For The Unbanked
CZ did not spend much time attacking gold. Instead he attacked the idea that only physical things have value.
You use iPhone, X, Google, he told Schiff. None of those are physical objects in any meaningful way. They are code and networks. They are still incredibly valuable.
Bitcoin is the same pattern. On-chain there is no “Bitcoin file.” There is only a public ledger of inputs and outputs. Ownership is defined by the ledger, not by a bar in a vault. The supply is fixed at 21 million coins. Every issuance rule is transparent, baked into open source code, not into opaque mining data or “trusted” refineries.
Gold supply is uncertain. There might be a huge new deposit discovered tomorrow. One day someone may even figure out how to synthesize gold at scale. Bitcoin supply is not uncertain. Everyone knows the schedule. That, in his view, is a new kind of scarcity that markets have never had before.
He leaned hard on adoption. Binance alone serves around 300 million users. That is larger than most countries. When systems get that big, he argued, they stop being roulette tables and start being part of the financial fabric.
He told one story that landed with the crowd. A user in Africa wrote to him during the US case against Binance. Before crypto, this person had to walk three days to a city just to pay a bill. After crypto, he could send the same payment in three minutes from his phone. Over time he saved fifty dollars, then one hundred, then one thousand. In his local economy that thousand dollars was life changing.
You can build that with stablecoins or Bitcoin. Either way, he said, you are using blockchains, not correspondent banks and dusty ledgers. Bitcoin is the flagship of that entire stack.
Is Bitcoin Money Or Just A Giant Bet?
The sharpest clash was about what counts as money.
For Schiff, money must be the most liquid good in an economy. People must use it as unit of account, medium of exchange and store of value. By that standard, he says, Bitcoin fails. Shops do not price goods in BTC. Salaries are not quoted in BTC. When a company “pays in Bitcoin,” the contract is still denominated in dollars or euros, then translated into BTC at the last minute.
Most Bitcoin volume, in his eyes, is just casino flow. People trade BTC against other coins and against fiat. They are not buying food, rent and labor. And unlike a share of stock, there are no cash flows, no dividends, no earnings behind the ticker. The only way to profit is to sell to a later buyer. That is the “greater fool” structure, independent of how many people join.
CZ agreed that speculation is part of the picture, just like it is in equities or FX. But he pushed back on the idea that nothing else exists.
Some employees and investors, he said, have actually signed deals denominated directly in BTC. The Binance card lets users spend crypto in the real world. Yes, on the back end Binance converts to fiat for the merchant, but to the user the experience is paying with Bitcoin, not with a brokerage account.
More importantly, he argued, volatility does not decide whether something can be money. Fiat is volatile against real goods. Gold is volatile. Many national currencies have crashed far more brutally than BTC did. What matters is whether people choose to hold and use the asset.
On that metric, he pointed to hundreds of millions of wallets and trillions in cumulative on-chain settlement as proof that Bitcoin has moved beyond being a toy.
Performance, Cycles And The Battle For “Digital Gold”
Schiff went for the scoreboard. In late 2021, when Bitcoin hit about 69,000 dollars, one BTC could buy roughly 37 ounces of gold. Today, at current levels, it buys around 22 ounces. By his math, that is a forty percent loss of purchasing power against gold across four years that included spot ETFs, Super Bowl ads, political donors and endless media hype. If the asset cannot make new highs after that kind of push, he says, it is probably overvalued.
He sees the 2010s and early 2020s as a window where gold stalled and Bitcoin hijacked its narrative. Now that gold has broken out again and silver is running, he expects capital to rotate back into metals and away from crypto. Central banks are buying bullion, not BTC. Retail investors, he predicts, will follow once they realize how much risk they are taking on a purely speculative token with no industrial demand.
CZ countered with a longer horizon. From zero to tens of thousands of dollars in fifteen years is a historic run. No one is entitled to another thousand percent. As an asset matures, returns compress. That is true for gold, equities and Bitcoin.
He also reminded the room that gold dropped in the last few weeks too. For a shop owner operating on ten percent margins, gold’s drawdown can be just as painful as Bitcoin’s. Volatility is a fact of life, not a moral judgment.
Underneath the numbers is a philosophical split. Schiff believes value must ultimately be anchored in physical usefulness. CZ believes that network effects, code and global consensus can create value even when the underlying thing is just entries in a database.
Where They Actually Agree
For all the sparks, there was real overlap.
Both men agree that tokenized gold is a serious use case. Putting fully allocated bullion on-chain makes it more liquid, more divisible and more usable as a settlement asset. Both agree that banks and payment companies can build cards and rails that abstract away the conversion. Both agree that traditional finance is bloated, slow and often hostile to ordinary users.
Schiff even half joked that he wants his tokenized gold listed on Binance. CZ smiled and said the door is open.
The debate ended with a polite “agree to disagree.” Schiff still thinks Bitcoin will eventually collapse and teach a generation of young traders a painful but useful lesson. CZ still thinks Bitcoin will outperform gold and serve as digital gold 2.0 for a world that spends more time online than in vaults.
For traders and investors, the choice is stark. On one side is an old asset with deep industrial, jewelry and reserve demand that is slowly getting a digital wrapper. On the other is a young asset that exists only as code and consensus, yet already has hundreds of millions of users and runs a huge slice of the crypto economy.
Which one you back says a lot about what you think money should be in the next twenty years.
Disclaimer: This document is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. The views expressed in this document are not, and should not be taken as, investment advice or recommendations. Recipients should do their own due diligence, taking into account their specific financial circumstances, investment objectives and risk tolerance, which are not considered here, before investing. This document is not an offer, or the solicitation of an offer, to buy or sell any of the assets mentioned.