Schiff: Bitcoin Has No Earnings

Peter Schiff, the Euro Pacific Capital chief economist who has built a career on predicting the collapse of the fiat monetary system, turned his sights once again to the “cash flow” argument on Tuesday. 

The gold bug contrasted the projected revenue of industrial silver miners against the yield-free nature of the world’s largest digital asset.

The companies extracting this metal, Schiff argued, are positioned for an earnings explosion in 2026. Their current equity valuations, he claimed, fail to predict the coming windfall.

Bitcoin, in stark contrast to these productive enterprises, offers no such promise.

The ‘zero-yield’ critique

The “no earnings” criticism, a favorite bludgeon of traditional finance skeptics, strikes at the heart of how institutional investors value assets. Bitcoin has no internal mechanism to generate yield. It produces nothing. A share of Apple represents a claim on future cash flows. Meanwhile, a Bitcoin represents only a claim on the ledger itself.

Warren Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha, is the most famous proponent of this view. His core philosophy is that an asset must produce something to have value.

Charlie Munger, Buffet’s right-hand man, has argued that investing in non-productive assets was gambling rather than investing.

Consequently, they categorize crypto not as an investment, but as a speculation reliant entirely on the “Greater Fool Theory.” 

The only way to profit is to sell the asset to someone else for a higher price later, as Schiff argues.

Another attack on Strategy 

Schiff has also launched a new mathematical attack on Michael Saylor’s accumulation model. He argues that the aggressive purchasing habits of Strategy (ticker MSTR) have destroyed the company’s efficiency.

Schiff’s core critique centers on the company’s rising cost basis. Strategy, having bought Bitcoin for five years, now has an average cost per coin of roughly $75,000, according to Schiff’s calculations.

This high water mark means the firm is sitting on a “paper profit” of just 16% on its entire position. Broken down annually, this amounts to a return of just over 3% per year. Schiff contends that Saylor would have been “much better off” buying almost any other asset class over that five-year period.