Peter Schiff insists that Bitcoin’s bubble has burst following its steep fall from an October 2025 all-time high of $126,000.

However, investor Anthony Pompliano defended the cryptocurrency’s long-term performance and argued that volatility is part of what has driven its returns.

Schiff Makes the Bear Case, Pompliano Leans on the Long Game

The two faced off Monday evening on Fox Business in a live debate moderated by Liz Claman, where Schiff opened by claiming that BTC was a “digital nothing” and calling it a pyramid scheme in which early holders have been cashing out on the wave of demand generated by ETFs and Bitcoin treasury companies led by Michael Saylor’s Strategy.

“All the hype, all of the Bitcoin treasury companies, all of the ETFs, all that buying has simply allowed the people who got in early to cash out,” said Schiff to Claman.

According to him, those buying Bitcoin were only acting on the expectation that “somebody else is going to buy it at a higher price,” an approach he contrasted with gold, which he described as a physical asset with industrial and monetary use.

The economist also claimed that the OG crypto has “no real long-term,” arguing that it was barely higher than where it was five years ago, and framed that sideways drift as evidence of a market that was running on fumes rather than real demand. Gold, on the other hand, in Schiff’s estimation, is in a longer-term bull market, with the analyst suggesting that its recent pullback from $2,600 was due to a classic “buy the rumor, sell the fact” move after an overextended run linked to geopolitical risk pricing.

However, Pompliano, wearing a gold tie in a pointed nod to Schiff, pushed back on that framing and pointed out that Bitcoin’s 10-year compound annual growth rate of around 55% to 60% was several times bigger than gold’s, which, according to him, stands at approximately 12%. The ProCap CEO also said that volatility wasn’t unique to BTC and should not be thought of as a flaw, as it is a characteristic shared by high-performing assets.

“One of the misconceptions about volatility is that volatility is bad,” Pompliano noted. “But actually what we find is the best returning stocks, the best returning commodities, they are all highly volatile.”

On Strategy and Political Concerns

Of course, a Schiff BTC debate wouldn’t have been complete without throwing shade at Strategy, and the gold bug did not disappoint. He claimed executive chairman Saylor was “sacrificing his own shareholders by destroying value” with the firm’s financial model moving from issuing stocks at premiums to selling shares at discounts and using leverage tools to continue buying Bitcoin.

The company did sell a small amount of Bitcoin recently but returned with a 1,587 BTC buy on June 15, worth $100 million, that took its holdings to 846,842. According to Schiff, the fact that Strategy sold some of its BTC, however small the number, suggests there’s a strain in what he described as its “flywheel” model of perpetual accumulation.

One area of partial agreement between Pompliano and Schiff was political. Pompliano acknowledged that the Trump administration’s backing of crypto represents politicians latching onto donor money rather than principled support, while Schiff was even blunter, calling government involvement in Bitcoin “a serious problem” and describing it as a deliberate misdirection of resources.