Peter Schiff: Bitcoin's Loudest Hater

In February 2026, with Bitcoin at about $66,000 and falling, Peter Schiff posted the call he had been making for more than a decade. If Bitcoin broke below $50,000, he wrote on X, it seemed "highly likely" to at least test $20,000, an 84% fall from its October 2025 record of $126,000. He signed off: "Sell Bitcoin now!"

Bitcoin never broke $50,000. It fell to about $58,600 at the start of July and traded at about $82,000 on 16 October 2026. Gold, the metal Schiff has spent his career selling, hit a record above $5,500 an ounce in January. For once, the scorecard was not one-sided.

The gold bug

Schiff is an American stockbroker, author and podcaster who founded the brokerage Euro Pacific Capital and the precious-metals dealer SchiffGold. He made his name before the 2008 financial crisis, when he warned on television that the US housing market and the banks behind it would collapse. Clips of pundits laughing at him became a staple of YouTube after he turned out to be right, and he has traded on that credibility ever since.

His case against Bitcoin has barely changed. Gold has been money for thousands of years, he argues, and has uses in jewellery and industry. Bitcoin is backed by nothing, its price rests on people believing others will pay more, and it will end at or near zero. He is open about his interest: he sells gold. In November 2013, responding on CNBC to the Winklevoss twins, the early investors who called Bitcoin "gold 2.0", he called it a bubble resembling "modern-day tulip mania". Bitcoin was then worth a few hundred dollars.

A decade of zero

The calls grew louder with the price. In August 2017 he told CoinDesk that even at $4,000 Bitcoin was "still a bubble". On 10 December 2017, with Bitcoin at $15,374, TheStreet ran the headline "Bitcoin Prices Are Headed to $0.00: Peter Schiff". The education site 99Bitcoins, which tracks every notable declaration that Bitcoin is dead, lists four Schiff entries from that year alone. Bitcoin did fall by more than 80% over the following year. It did not go to zero.

Then came the episodes that made him a figure of fun. On 19 January 2020 Schiff tweeted that he had lost all his Bitcoin because his wallet, the app that holds the digital keys to the coins, no longer recognised his password. He blamed the software. Three days later he admitted he had mixed up his PIN with his password and had never written down the backup recovery phrase, the master key that can restore a wallet, Bloomberg and Cointelegraph reported. He called it an "honest but costly mistake". The coins had been a gift.

On 10 March 2021 he announced that his son, Spencer, had sold the last of his silver shares and moved his whole portfolio into Bitcoin, buying on a dip below $50,000. "I need to disinherit him," Schiff joked, "otherwise he will squander my hard earned wealth on more Bitcoin," as Entrepreneur and Forklog reported. Bitcoin went on to $69,000 that November.

His business had a harder time. On 30 June 2022 Puerto Rico's financial regulator, the OCIF, ordered Euro Pacific International Bank, the offshore bank Schiff owned, to stop operating, citing insufficient capital and breaches of an earlier consent order. The bank had been the target of Operation Atlantis, an investigation into suspected offshore tax evasion by the J5, a group of tax enforcement agencies from five countries including the US Internal Revenue Service. No charges against Schiff have been reported, and Schiff has called the closure a conspiracy by "corrupt IRS agents" and the press.

2025 and 2026: his best year

The record for 2025 and 2026 is his strongest. Gold rose from about $2,670 an ounce at the start of 2025 to above $4,000 in October 2025 and set a record above $5,500 in late January 2026, according to futures prices. Bitcoin peaked on 6 October 2025 and then lost more than half its value by mid-2026.

Schiff pressed the point. In December 2025 he debated Changpeng Zhao, the founder of the Binance exchange, at Binance Blockchain Week in Dubai, arguing that Bitcoin was "backed by nothing" and "a lottery ticket, not a store of value", as The Block reported. He was promoting his own product, TGold, which issues tokens backed by gold held in vaults, so that gold can move over a blockchain like a crypto coin. On 9 February 2026 he posted that the $126,000 high "may have been the final" one. In July he said that many people regret not buying Bitcoin early and "more will regret not selling above $60,000", and that he would not buy it even at $20,000, Benzinga reported. In August he argued that artificial intelligence was a threat to Bitcoin, not a reason to buy it. The tracker Bitcoindeaths.com counts at least five Schiff death notices in 2026.

From the October 2025 peak to 16 October 2026, gold rose about 6% and Bitcoin fell about 35%. On that window, Schiff was right.

The long scorecard

Over any longer window he was not. When TheStreet ran his "$0.00" headline in December 2017, Bitcoin cost $15,374 and gold about $1,244 an ounce. On 16 October 2026 Bitcoin is about $82,000, more than five times higher, and gold about $4,200, more than three times higher. Measured from his first bubble call in 2013, when Bitcoin cost hundreds of dollars and gold about $1,250, Bitcoin has risen many times further than the metal he sells.

His February 2026 trigger at $50,000 never fired, and his "sell now" came at about $66,000, below where Bitcoin trades today. He has been right about Bitcoin's crashes, which are frequent, and wrong about its death, which keeps not happening. That combination has kept him on air for thirteen years.