In what was billed as the "biggest bitcoin vs gold debate in history," and moderated by Ran of Crypto Banter, the event featured four financial heavyweights squaring off to argue the merits and flaws of bitcoin and gold as potential future stores of value and mediums of exchange.
In one corner were the bitcoin backers - Eric Voorhees, an early bitcoin adopter and founder of ShapeShift, and Anthony Scaramucci, founder of SkyBridge Capital and former White House spokesman. They championed bitcoin as a revolutionary, decentralized digital currency outside government control.
"Bitcoin is radical, it's rebellious, it's non-compliant, it's American," Scaramucci proclaimed. Voorhees added "Anything that moves the world away from centralized control of money to market-based control of money is something I would be in favor of."
In the other corner were gold advocates Peter Schiff, CEO of Euro Pacific Asset Management who famously predicted the 2008 housing crash, and economist Nouriel Roubini. They argued bitcoin has no intrinsic value and is essentially "digital fools gold."
"Bitcoin can't do anything that gold can do...You can't have digital gold, you can't make jewelry out of it," Schiff stated. Roubini bluntly called bitcoin "a damned speculative asset - that's it."
Schiff and Roubini repeated the same anti-crypto talking points they've been saying for the last 10 years... unfortunately, in 7 out of those 10 years Bitcoin outperformed all other investments.
How can anyone with a track record that includes 7 years of advising investors to avoid the most profitable investment still be taken seriously?
The intense 2+ hour debate covered a wide range of topics around modern monetary theory, inflation, the economic outlook, role of governments, and the fundamental value propositions of bitcoin vs gold.
Voorhees and Scaramucci made the case that bitcoin's fixed supply of 21 million coins and properties like pseudo-anonymity give it immense value as "a non-debasable monetary commodity." As Scaramucci said, "We took [the working class] from aspirational to desperation in 35 years" due to currency inflation.
However, Schiff and Roubini countered that bitcoin fails all the tests of being a true currency. "It's not a unit of account, not a scalable means of payment, and not a stable store of value...it can never be money," Roubini argued.
While no minds seemed changed by the intense back-and-forth, it encapsulated the broader ideological battle between bitcoin's freedom philosophy and gold's traditional role.
With bitcoin's market cap over $1.2 trillion, this debate is no longer hypothetical. Its outcome will shape monetary systems, investing, privacy and decentralization for years ahead.
I tried my best to summarize the debate that ran slight over 2 hours long, but if you want to see every minute for yourself, you can view an archive of the live stream on Crypto Banter's Youtube Channel.
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Author: Oliver Redding
Seattle Newsdesk /
