Peter Schiff, well-known for his skepticism of the crypto-sphere, has said that crypto-assets have no intrinsic value, and investors should sell off any they own, before they all become completely worthless.
As analysts discuss the “crypto-winter,” amid plunging values of digital assets, and the collapse of established cryptocurrency players like FTX and Three Arrows Capital, Schiff insists that what investors are looking at is more than a mere temporary downturn in asset values. For this reason he sees the term crypto-winter as misleading.
The CEO and chief global strategist at Euro Pacific Capital wrote to fans in Twitter, “This is not a #crypto winter. That implies spring is coming. This is also not a crypto ice age, as even that came to an end after a couple of million years. This is crypto extinction.”
The long-term gold enthusiast went on to speculate that bullion would “rise again to lead a new breed of asset-backed cryptos.”
Schiff has long derided cryptocurrencies, having said that Bitcoin was merely caught within a massive speculative bubble which would explode, leaving those who bought it with a worthless digital asset nobody would want. In February of last year, he had warned the top cryptocurrencies could lose all of their value by the end of the year.
Previously, he had said of Bitcoin, when it hit $50,000 in 2021, “while a temporary move up to $100K is possible, a permanent move down to zero is inevitable.”
Since touching an all-time high of almost $69,000 per token in November of 2021, Bitcoin has lost roughly 75% of its value, as the entire cryptocurrency market has seen more than $2 trillion wiped off its books by the implosion of the sector.
And that ignores the collapse of other entities in the sector which continue to threaten to spread into various stablecoins and other projects. The collapse of the FTX crypto-exchange, one of the world’s largest exchanges, continues to send ripples throughout the crypto world, as other entities such as crypto-lender Genesis now teeter amid rumors of asset comingling with more speculative ventures, which were set off by FTX’s collapse locking up the assets of these entities and triggering liquidity crises.
Bitcoin was trading at $16,719 per token on Friday.
