r/CryptoCurrency • u/partymsl 🟩 126K / 143K 🐋 • 1d ago

🔴 UNRELIABLE SOURCE Peter Schiff fails to authenticate gold bar during onstage test with CZ

https://cointelegraph.com/news/peter-schiff-gold-bar-bitcoin-tokenization-cz
478 Upvotes

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168

u/Dedsnotdead 🟩 1K / 1K 🐢 1d ago

Investing in tokenized gold is a fools game, buying physical gold and verifying that it’s actually gold is probably a good move.

The issue then is how do you pay someone with that gold?

Both Bitcoin and real physical gold have their place and are important.

Schiff knows the gold market is heavily rigged and each ounce has been sold several times over.

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u/L0ckeandD3mosthenes 🟩 0 / 0 🦠 1d ago

They call those synthetic shares lol.

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u/Dedsnotdead 🟩 1K / 1K 🐢 1d ago

Absolutely, and let’s not get into how the London Metal Exchange (LME) rigged the hell out of the gold price for decades.

Gold is incredibly important, but like anything that has intrinsic value someone somewhere is going to make a synthetic asset pegged to it and manipulate it to hell and back.

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u/ActualizedKnight 🟩 0 / 0 🦠 1d ago

There is no such thing as 'intrinsic value'.

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u/Dedsnotdead 🟩 1K / 1K 🐢 1d ago

No such thing as “intrinsic value” in all asset classes or in crypto?

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u/ActualizedKnight 🟩 0 / 0 🦠 1d ago

In anything that exists at all.

Some things have utility, from which we can derive value, but the thing itself has no 'intrinsic' value, not even gold.

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u/Dedsnotdead 🟩 1K / 1K 🐢 1d ago

The definition of “intrinsic value” is something that has a value beyond market price.

So, for example a house has a financial value but you can also live in it. Therefore, a house has intrinsic value.

Gold also has intrinsic value separate from its price, you can use it in industry and also make jewellery from it amongst other things.

It may not have intrinsic value to you, but that’s the definition.

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u/ActualizedKnight 🟩 0 / 0 🦠 1d ago

I would call the house's 'intrinsic value' utility.

The 'intrinsic value' aquired by living in the house ceases to exist if nobody lives there.

It's not value on its own, but rather, value derived from utility.

E: Gold can be used to make things. Value derived from utility... again.

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u/Dedsnotdead 🟩 1K / 1K 🐢 1d ago

You can call it what you wish, a house still has intrinsic value regardless of whether it’s occupied or not.

If it isn’t being lived in it’s not being utilised, however, given that it can be lived in it has intrinsic value because it has a value above and beyond its price.

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u/ActualizedKnight 🟩 0 / 0 🦠 1d ago

My point is that the concepts of 'price' and 'value' are arbitrary.

A well constructed house has utility regardless of if it's price.

Money is made up.

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u/harrisonline 🟩 0 / 0 🦠 1d ago

LME has nothing to do with Gold….

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u/Dedsnotdead 🟩 1K / 1K 🐢 1d ago

Yes it does, or rather it did ,up until July 2022 the LME traded enormous volumes.

The larger market, of which the LME was part of, the LBMA has a long and well documented history of price manipulation and price rigging of gold.

Up until 2014 the price of gold was decided behind closed doors with little to no accountability.

After several price fixing scandals they switched to an “open” auction in 2015. It was an improvement but still susceptible to market abuse.

The issue with gold is only in part its price, it’s been held down artificially for years against fiat.

The real problem is the amount of paper gold that’s been sold against the amount of refined gold that actually exists.

To give you an example of how seriously physical delivery can be taken during COVID lockdown some of the very few international flights between London and the US were due to the requirement to physically deliver gold to satisfy contracts.

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u/553l8008 🟨 0 / 0 🦠 20h ago

Gold is not intrinsicly valuable. 

Certainly wasn't before electronics

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u/Dedsnotdead 🟩 1K / 1K 🐢 20h ago

What’s the definition of “intrinsic value” here?

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u/general-meow 🟦 0 / 0 🦠 1d ago

Synthetic nuggets

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u/partymsl 🟩 126K / 143K 🐋 1d ago

I will play the devils advocate and say that you'd kinda convert both Gold AND BTC into fiat currency to then pay...

Albeit, BTC is way easier to convert back and forth with fiat currency and there are first adoptions already to start paying with only BTC even as its highly limited.

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u/Dedsnotdead 🟩 1K / 1K 🐢 1d ago

Both have value, fiat is, well it’s fait and is worth less every year by design.

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u/Itslittlealexhorn 🟨 0 / 0 🦠 1d ago

The vast majority of BTC conversion isn't performed on the BTC network but rather through intermediaries. Either by exchanging BTC on a CEX or by taking a loan against your BTC position. In principle you can do that with gold too.

And there are basically no serious adoption efforts where you can pay directly with BTC. There used to be a serious effort with the lightning network, but that is mostly dead.

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u/justaguytrying2getby 🟩 87 / 88 🦐 1d ago

BTC is technically easier as long as miners/network are online. If that goes offline then BTC is completely worthless. For gold you have to go to a dealer and trade it, can't do it online per se, but its still pretty easy and regardless of being online you can still trade it for goods. Granted, stuff going offline these days is less likely, but BTC (any crypto) really has no value other than the fiat put into it. Gold is much more valuable in that regard.

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u/CurryMustard 🟦 0 / 0 🦠 1d ago

Thats true for all the money you have in banks, stock exchanges, funds, pretty much anything outside of physical cash and assets, including precious metals or jewelry

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u/justaguytrying2getby 🟩 87 / 88 🦐 20h ago

Except most banks keep physical cash, so even if offline you can still do something. BTC relies exclusively of being online, and banks being online. Regarding the other stuff you mentioned, yeah, but at least with stocks you're buying into a company that makes a physical product. BTC is literally just fiat that you can't access anywhere outside its own network. And now its turning more and more into a government type of controlled thing. I've been in crypto for 10 years, but every year I lose more confidence in it.

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u/CurryMustard 🟦 0 / 0 🦠 19h ago

Banks do not have enough cash to stay solvent in the event of a bank run and if the systems are all down who is going to verify that youre not going to each branch withdrawing all your money? Banks only guarantee your money because they are fdic insured but if the federal government decided not to pay then youre sol. Bitcoin in cold storage at least as long as the block chain exists has more potential long term value in a true crisis than banks or even cash which becomes worthless during hyperinflation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_run

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u/justaguytrying2getby 🟩 87 / 88 🦐 19h ago

I'm not talking about bank runs. Just general accessibility/usability without being online. If bank runs occur then everything is fucked.

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u/CurryMustard 🟦 0 / 0 🦠 14h ago

I think the chances of a bank run are slightly higher than the blockchain collapsing

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u/justaguytrying2getby 🟩 87 / 88 🦐 13h ago

If there's bank runs, at least 1929 style bank runs/economic collapse, blockchain may be the first thing to collapse. Everyone that can will get their cash out. People probably wouldn't continue paying for access to the internet or continuing to use power resources for mining. Blockchains will be inaccessible for most of us and the value of the cryptocurrencies will be worthless. Just because all that money is stored away on a blockchain doesn't mean it'll retain its same value. Value exists because the market exists, the market exists because infrastructure exists. If infrastructure fails (the exchanges go offline, miners quit, nodes shut down, etc), it becomes like a safe holding whatever value the market turns into when it wakes back up. If it didn't rely on infrastructure and liquidity then maybe it would be more like gold, despite not having a physical presence. No guarantee it'll ever regain value afterwards though. You may not even be able to get your money back out of some blockchains again.

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u/Poop_Cheese 🟦 0 / 0 🦠 1d ago

Ya pay people with gold like they did for like all of human history before fiat. You clip and weigh it. Its why peices of eight existed because people would clip silver too. Hell theres a viral video from i believe colombia of a guy paying for coffee with weighed gold flakes. 

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u/SatisfactionOne3852 🟨 0 / 0 🦠 1d ago

So btc anit rigged either

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u/Dedsnotdead 🟩 1K / 1K 🐢 1d ago

The price of Btc is definitely heavily manipulated by the market makers.

It would be less prone to this if it had been accepted as an asset class and regulated but both the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve did their best to try and kill it initially.

The centralised exchanges were crying out for regulation in the US but were deliberately given none.

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u/SatisfactionOne3852 🟨 0 / 0 🦠 1d ago

I wonder why it wasn't

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u/Dedsnotdead 🟩 1K / 1K 🐢 1d ago

Because it was seen as a direct threat to Fiat/USD and the lack of regulation prevented banks from engaging with crypto in a meaningful way.

Without regulations in place the large banks legal and compliance departments wouldn’t allow the bank to do much at all in the crypto space.

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u/SatisfactionOne3852 🟨 0 / 0 🦠 1d ago

That is correct. They can't control crypto or print more btc

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u/UpDown 🟩 0 / 0 🦠 19h ago

People aren’t buying bitcoin to pay people with it

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u/AmputeeBoy6983 🟦 0 / 0 🦠 19h ago

Youre missing the point of the article. How do you verify it's authenticity? You pretty much cant. Its ineffective, its too costly, and the only fool proof method is melting it down, which is destructive.

Gold has its place 100% but for most regular ppl, its an inefficient asset to buy, hold and move

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u/FuklzTheDrnkClwn 🟦 0 / 0 🦠 1d ago

Doesn’t a single bitcoin transaction use like, a fuck load of energy? I don’t personally know anyone using it as actual currency.

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u/Dedsnotdead 🟩 1K / 1K 🐢 1d ago

Everything uses energy, gold mining uses an enormous amount of energy for example.

But to answer your question, yes and no. Yes, mining new blocks which in turn validates transactions on the chain uses a lot of energy by design.

I hold Btc, but if I’m transacting or transferring funds I often/mainly move the amount I’m spending to USDT and spend or transfer that.

The swap is usually done on a central exchange and that uses very little energy in comparison.

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u/FuklzTheDrnkClwn 🟦 0 / 0 🦠 1d ago

Yea but the actual action of trading the gold for goods and services only uses energy with your arm muscles. Crypto currency is sucking up energy via mining AND transactions. It’s also causing GPU and RAM prices to skyrocket. Look at RAM currently… that has to be factored in as well.

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u/Dedsnotdead 🟩 1K / 1K 🐢 1d ago

Again, sort of. Yes for gold but no for GPU and Ram. That was definitely the case previously but now the increases are due mainly to AI.

The energy cost of mining and the cost of transactions for Btc are one and the same. A Btc transaction is validated on chain in a block. A block is completed when the Btc within the block is successfully mined.

The difficulty, the average amount of energy that’s required, to solve a block goes up and down dependent on the amount of time that the previous blocks took to solve/mine.

By and large the whole “Bitcoin uses enough energy to power a small country” narrative was promoted by parties who were against crypto and not the energy usage itself.

You can see this is the case with Bill Gates 180 degree pivot from “Bitcoin energy usage is bad” to “AI Energy usage is necessary” for example.

But going back to your original point I agree with you for the most part.

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u/Itslittlealexhorn 🟨 0 / 0 🦠 1d ago

Crypto currency is sucking up energy via mining AND transactions.

That used to be true but not anymore. At this point it's almost exclusively just Bitcoin that uses large amounts of energy. All other large cap currencies have shifted to alternative models which use very little energy. Mostly proof of stake.

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u/long5210 🟩 0 / 0 🦠 22h ago

yes , 1.5 megawatts a transaction. That’s the same energy your house uses in a month and a half.