Prominent financial commentator Peter Schiff recently took aim at ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood and her vision for the future of digital savings.
Wood on Bitcoin, arguing that the legacy precious metal is historically overvalued and primed for a major correction.
The case for tokenized gold
Schiff has rejected the idea that Bitcoin might have any utility in the long term, predicting that investors seeking the technological benefits of blockchain will ultimately pivot toward asset-backed digital currencies rather than decentralized crypto assets.
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“For real savings, they will buy gold,” Schiff stated. “If they want crypto instead, they will buy tokenized gold.”
Gold is “riding for a fall”
Cathie Wood, however, completely rejects the premise that gold is the safer bet. Speaking on a recent episode of the Rundown podcast, the ARK Invest CEO pointed out that the ratio of gold to the M2 money supply recently hit an all-time high.
According to Wood, the last times gold reached these relative levels were during the double-digit inflation crises of the 1970s and 1980s, and the Great Depression of the 1930s, environments vastly different from today’s economic landscape.
“I think gold is probably riding for a fall,” Wood noted. “If I were a betting person… I would make a shift from gold into Bitcoin.”
The “real savings” debate
Wood has argued that Bitcoin’s programmatic scarcity makes it inherently superior to gold.
She acknowledged that fiat-pegged stablecoins are currently taking over the role of digital “checking accounts” in emerging markets, but she firmly believes Bitcoin will serve as the premier digital savings account.
“This idea of digital gold, it is better than gold actually,” Wood explained. “The supply growth of Bitcoin is 0.8% per year and it’ll drop to 0.4% in another two years. I’ll bet you a lot that gold supplies are going to be up much more than that. Their average over time is 1%.”
Wood reiterated ARK’s staggering $1.5 million bull-case price target for Bitcoin by 2030.