“Backed by nothing?” inside the epic Bitcoin battle between Changpeng Zhao and Peter Schiff

CZ and Peter Schiff spar over Bitcoin and tokenized gold, exposing a deeper fight about utility, trust, and what really backs the money of the future.

Binance’s latest headline debate is not really about metal versus code or Bitcoin. It is about what people trust in a world where inflation gnaws at savings, ETFs hoover up retail capital, and tokenization moves from marketing slogan to live product. In “Bitcoin vs Gold: CZ & Peter Schiff Battle Over the Future of Money,” the Binance founder and the gold bug economist fight over whether the next monetary standard will live in vaults or in wallets, and whose believers end up holding the bag.​

Peter Schiff comes armed with a concrete offer. Through his platform TGold, he tells the audience, users can buy “segregated and vaulted” metal and later withdraw bars, coins or a digital claim on that same gold. “The token is the evidence that you own it,” he says, comparing it to a coat check ticket that is not a coat but gets you the coat on demand. For Schiff, tokenized bullion “improves on all of [gold’s] monetary properties” by making it more divisible and transferable “without losing the most important property, which is it’s a store of value because its value is the gold that the token represents.”​

That sets up his familiar broadside at Bitcoin (BTC). Fiat currencies, he says, are “paper currency backed by nothing” that only survive on “faith and confidence,” and “what Bitcoin is like, Bitcoin is like the fiat currency because it’s backed by nothing.” Tokenized gold, by contrast, is “legitimate because it’s backed by something” and “derives its value from gold,” while Bitcoin “derives its value from confidence, from faith. If people think it has value, then they’re willing to buy it.” The critique lands in a cycle where Bitcoin ETFs keep pulling in billions, even as central banks quietly extend a record run of physical gold purchases in response to inflation and geopolitical fractures.​

CZ does not contest that tokenization upgrades bullion. “The digitized gold might be actually better than gold in a lot of ways,” he tells Schiff, praising its divisibility and portability and even saying he hopes to list the TGold token on Binance. What he rejects is the idea that lack of physical substance makes Bitcoin fragile. “Bitcoin itself actually doesn’t exist,” he explains. “All there is is records of transactions on the blockchain.” Yet that is no different in principle, he argues, from the way users ascribe value to X or Google: “The internet has nothing physical [but] has value. It’s a utility tool.”​

The utility argument now has live data behind it. Since January, billions have flowed into spot Bitcoin ETFs in the United States and other markets, giving pension funds and traditional asset managers tidy exposure to what CZ calls “an entire industry, not just money.” He leans hard on that framing. Bitcoin, he says, is “a two or three trillion dollar asset and it’s still growing,” and its usefulness shows up not just on trading screens but in payments rails, custody businesses and on chain settlement that underpin everything from stablecoins to DeFi.​

When Schiff claims Bitcoin “does nothing” beyond transfer itself, CZ counters with a story from the margins. An African user wrote to him, he says, explaining that “before crypto it takes him three days to pay a bill” on foot, whereas “after Binance he has access to crypto and now paying the bill is three minutes,” allowing him to build savings of “$50, $100, $300, $1,000” in a very poor country. For CZ, that is not theory. “That improves people’s materially … improved his life,” he says, and it is hard to imagine doing the same thing with a one kilogram bar and a border guard.​

Schiff repeatedly drags the discussion back to motives. “Bitcoin is being used as a speculative digital asset,” he insists, “not being used as money.” In his telling, most flows into spot ETFs and corporate treasuries look less like a monetary revolution and more like a familiar risk trade, no different in spirit from retail piling into tech stocks in 2021. He notes that when Bitcoin hit 69,000 dollars in the previous cycle it bought “37.2 ounces of gold,” whereas “today … it buys 22.15 ounces,” meaning that “Bitcoin buys 40 percent fewer ounces of gold today than it did four years ago.” With gold and silver both breaking into fresh highs this year and central banks still accumulating bullion, he argues, “one of the reasons that Bitcoin was able to do so well” is that gold “went sideways for about 12, 13 years,” a period he now sees reversing.​

The debate brushes against a wider market backdrop. Michael Saylor still talks about “10 million dollars a coin” on conference stages, even as cyclical drawdowns and policy uncertainty keep volatility high. At the same time, tokenized Treasuries, stablecoins and gold backed instruments like TGold are becoming one of the fastest growing niches in crypto, pulling in both DeFi experiments and institutional pilots. Schiff’s bet is that as inflation bites harder, merchants will “prefer to receive gold” in settlement, while CZ’s wager is that younger generations will default to digital rails and that Bitcoin will benefit from that gravitational pull.​