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Peter Shiff is a great financial guru, he is known for being a big gold bug who loves calling Bitcoin fools gold. Peter has a good understerding of the economy and money but for some reason he seems to keep missing the importance and value of Bitcoin. I said seems to because this could be his way of promoting himself as the "loudest Bitcoin critic" since we know he is accepting bitcoin payments for gold he is dumping on his normie followers and he did have an auction to sell his gold ordinal JPGs on the Bitcoin timechain as well, but this is about his dismissive of Bitcoin.
Peter seems to believe that in oder for something to be money it needs to have an intrinsic value or a utility value like gold has. Let's debunk that first, yes it's true that gold is a very useful metal, in the periodic table it's one of the best conductor of electricity, gold electrical conductivity (S/m): 4.51 × 10^7, it's being used in some electronics like smartphones and other computers. Gold has also been used as jewelry for at least 5 thousand years. It's almost indestructible because it doesn't rust and you can melt it down to make it take any shape or forms you want without losing any mass nor properties. But what made gold money wasn't any of these things, but instead it was its scarcity.
Scarcity is the name of the game when it comes to money, it doesn't matter how beautiful and shiny you can make an object but if there can be an infinite amount of them it will eventually fail as money because the market will find ways to make more of it. Before gold there were other types of money like sea shells, Salt(thus the name salary), Rai stones, etc. But all of these things can be made more of and that's why they hyperinflate at some point and that's why nobody is willing to use them as a store of value anymore, therefore seized to be money. These are one of the biggest things Peter seems to miss. Gold became money because of its scarcity first, then it became used as jewelry because the man gives it to his wife in marriage so if he dies she has some hard money to take care of herself.
Overtime governments were able to capture gold by using counter parties to create too much paper gold certificates and massive leverage on top of it and because it's hard to audit the gold we have to trust that they are not counterfeiting it. That's why gold price is surpressed for so long it's not even keeping up to the rate of USD debasement.
Bitcoin is an improvement on Gold but it is even a better money than gold because there is no need to trust any body you can audit the ledger every ten minutes there is a new set of transactions stating who owns what and the total circulating supply that will never be more than 21Million bitcoins and which issuance decreases in half every for years till the year 2140 when the network transactions will already be enough to sustain itself. After the 2024 Bitcoin halving that happened in April 19th Bitcoin became scarcer than gold. Which mean there is less bitcoin available for sale right now than gold. Furthermore Gold is not that scarce compared to Bitcoin, if gold price goes up 2x Peter Shiff mining stock will get more funding to go dig more gold faster out of the ground to dump in market for profit to their shareholders, in contrast to Bitcoin even if the price 10x this year there is nothing the Bitcoin miners will get more than their scheduled block reward rate at the time. They can only increase their hashrate but not the issuance because Bitcoin is set in time not under the ground.
You see Bitcoin is a rigid monetary network that's has a auditable and fixed supply cap and it is a payment network at the same time, meanwhile gold is only a monetary store of value of which supply can be increased with enough money invested in mining. In history of monies the hardest always win other the others that's why I think Bitcoin could win over gold since it's a thousand times better.
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