While his electric car company announced a Bitcoin purchase weeks ago, Elon Musk finally turned into a real Bitcoin last night by embarking on a tried and true CryptoTwitter pastime: immersion in Peter Schiff.
Yesterday morning Schiff, the well-known gold bug and Bitcoin skeptic, posted a tweet criticizing Elon Musk’s comment that Bitcoin was a flawed currency when it was still better than Fiat alternatives:
According to @elonmusk, “Bitcoin is almost as BS as Fiat Money.” So Musk considers both #Bitcoin and Fiat to be BS. I agree, I just think that Bitcoin, a digital fiat, is even more of a BS than the paper fiat issued by central banks. #Gold is not BS. It’s real money and better than both!
– Peter Schiff (@PeterSchiff), February 19, 2021
Noting that the Tesla founder “as an engineer” should know the difference between a “tangible element” and a “sequence of numbers”, Schiff noted that gold is more useful than Bitcoin.
“Money is not data. Data can represent money, but it cannot replace it. Money improved bartering, gold improved money, and data improved #gold. Bitcoin is a return to barter. All sellers accept money. With #Bitcoin you have to find a seller who has what you want and wants what you have, ”concluded Schiff.
In response, the Tesla founder criticized Schiff’s view that third-party gold storage provided an extra layer of trust, saying he “might as well have crypto.”
An email saying you have gold is not the same as gold. You might as well have crypto.
Money is just data that helps us avoid the inconvenience of bartering.
Like all data, this data is subject to latency and errors. The system will evolve into one that minimizes both.
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 20, 2021
Given how frivolously Musk promoted the Dogecoin meme currency, he backed up his statement with a perhaps surprising follow-up, warning that Bitcoin and Ether prices were “high”.
The Twitter statements are tempered, but only the most recent vote of confidence that the richest man in the world put in cryptocurrencies. Earlier this month, Tesla bought bitcoin with 7.7% of gross cash on hand, for an amount of $ 1.5 billion, and later said “just a fool” would not seek investments beyond fiat.
Schiff continues to be a punching bag that is so universal that even kebab restaurants have fun. While he recently admitted that Bitcoin is not the scam he once blamed, he remains determined to invest in physical gold bars. His Twitter trash talking continues even as his bank is still under investigation.
