Whether Bitcoin is valuable or great will ultimately be determined by time.

As early as June 20, 2011, Peter Schiff, chief economist and global strategy officer (some say CEO) of Euro Pacific Capital, an old friend of the Bitcoin community for more than a decade, and an advocate of hoarding gold to fight inflation, had a conversation with special guest Donald Norman from a London-based company engaged in Bitcoin-related consulting business on his radio program called "Peter Schiff Radio Show with Bitcoin". [1]

In this historic conversation, Peter Schiff criticized Bitcoin based on his common sense of economics. When they were doing the show, the price of Bitcoin was about $17.5. Today, March 23, 2022, more than a decade later, the price of Bitcoin is about $42,000.

Donald introduced the current status of Bitcoin at that time, such as the immature code, the difficulty for users to learn to keep their keys safe, the ease of losing coins, etc. Then he said that Bitcoin has some advantages over other currencies - just like gold became popular because it can be used as a store of value. You don't take broken gold to buy things on the street. Gold is just a store of value (SoV, Store of Value).

Talking about gold hit Peter Schiff in the head, and he immediately said that Bitcoin has no intrinsic value because you can't do anything with Bitcoin.

What Peter Schiff refers to as "using Bitcoin" is using Bitcoin itself to satisfy certain needs or desires of people, such as bread can be used for eating, houses can be used for living, gold can be used for jewelry, and so on.

In the economic definition, use value refers to the property of an object itself that can satisfy certain needs of people. Karl Marx (1818-1883) wrote in Section 4 of Chapter 1 of Volume 1 of Capital: "If commodities could speak, they would say that our use value concerns mankind. But as objects, we have no use value. As objects, we have only our value." "Value (exchange value) is the nature of objects, and use value is the nature of people." He continued to analyze, "The use value of objects can be realized by the direct relationship between objects and people without exchange; the value of objects must be realized by a social process, that is, by exchange", so "value must include exchange, but use value is not the case". Therefore, "use value is a property of people, and value is a property of commodities."

Following this logic, Peter Schiff said that Bitcoin can only try to become a medium of exchange (MoE), that is, it must be expected that another person will accept it, want it, and take it away from me.

But - he continued - unlike the US dollar, which is a medium of exchange because the US government accepts it for taxation, who will accept Bitcoin for taxation? No one. No tax subject will accept Bitcoin as a means of taxation.

On June 9, 2021, El Salavador passed the world's first Bitcoin bill. Article 4 of the bill clearly stipulates that "tax contributions can be paid in Bitcoin." (Reference: 2021/6/10 "Liu Jiaolian" WeChat article "A Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire")

Let's go back to Peter Schiff's live broadcast in June 2011. After he discussed that no one would accept Bitcoin, he continued: Gold is very different. Gold has intrinsic value, that is, it has its own use value. For example, even if no one wants gold, I can still use it to make jewelry, or use it in the electronics industry, etc.

In our lives, many of the things we can see and touch have both value and use value (most commodities), or things that have neither (such as garbage - although strictly speaking it cannot be said to be worthless), and things that have only use value but no value (such as sunlight and air). However, Bitcoin is different from all of these. It seems to be an alternative thing that does not belong to the above three categories.

Bitcoin seems to have value but no use value.

It is this quality that makes Bitcoin more purely monetary than gold, which still has some use value (such as electronic industry use, jewelry use, etc.). In a blog interaction on February 18, 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto continued to write: "In this sense, (Bitcoin) is a more typical precious metal. The supply is predetermined and the value changes, rather than changing the supply to keep the value stable. As the number of users increases, the value of each coin increases. It has the potential to form a positive feedback loop. As the number of users increases, the value will rise, which may attract more users to take advantage of the growing value to profit."

People desperately monetize certain goods with use value, such as houses, because they are afraid of the depreciation of cash, which will bring painful negative externalities (high housing prices). However, monetizing Bitcoin, which has no use value, will not bring any painful negative externalities. Therefore, in the article "Miscellaneous Thoughts" on the "Liu Jiaolian" public account on June 30, 2021, it was written:

“Bitcoin has no use value, which is the greatest good of Bitcoin. No matter how high the price of Bitcoin is, it will not cause any pain in our lives. The opposite example is a house.”

To this day, Peter Schiff is still "fighting" on the front line against Bitcoin. On his Twitter, he often expresses his cynical views on Bitcoin and his remarks that Bitcoin will return to zero. One of his purposes in belittling Bitcoin may be to highlight his praise for gold. His company provides gold storage and custody services.

There is a meme of Peter Schiff circulating in the Bitcoin community, which shows his pessimistic remarks on Bitcoin over the past decade and the price of Bitcoin at that time.

People in the community often go to his Twitter to give him advice, saying, "Comrade Peter, your trench is actually only a few centimeters away from ours, and you can stand in the same trench with us if you just move your butt a little."

However, Comrade Peter remained unmoved and has continued to be bearish on Bitcoin and bullish on gold for more than a decade.

Often at times like this, we will understand why some major social changes often take a generation or even several generations.

It is easy to shake a mountain, but difficult to shake the mind.

I think Satoshi Nakamoto was very clear about this, so he did not want to achieve a quick victory from the beginning, but set the Bitcoin halving production start-up phase to 131 years (2009-2140).

A protracted war that lasted nearly a century and a half.

The Hundred Years' War between England and France (1337-1453) lasted only 116 years.

Greatness, after all, is forged by time.