December 29, 2025
Last week, Peter joined Paul Barron to walk through why gold still defines "sound money," why Bitcoin falls short, and how tokenization could actually help precious metals - not replace them. He critiques the American obsession with crypto, warns about leveraged Bitcoin collapses, and explains how banks would treat tokenized gold very differently from tokenized dollars or Bitcoin.
He opens by reminding listeners what "sound money" originally meant and why gold fit that description in everyday commerce:
But number two, when you look at an actual gold standard when people were conducting commerce in gold, if you wanted to buy something you didn't just walk in with a big chunk of gold; you used coins, usually minted by the government, which were easily recognizable as legitimate legal tender. And so you knew that they were real; you didn't have to bother to study it. I mean you could just compare it to one that you already had, make sure it looks exactly the same, you could drop it on the table and make sure it makes the right sound compared to the sound that the coin you have makes.
Peter next points out the U.S. skew in Bitcoin adoption and the economic cost of pouring so many resources into unproductive crypto ventures:
I mean they talk incessantly about Bitcoin and they rarely mentioned gold. But I'm talking about the media in the United States and American citizens because I think Americans are disproportionately invested in Bitcoin. In fact, I think more than half of all the Bitcoin owners in the world live in the United States. And so obviously we're a small percent of the world's population, yet we have more than half of the world's Bitcoin. We have created a lot more Bitcoin companies than other nations have, and so when all those companies go bankrupt, which of course they will, it's going to have a more adverse impact on our economy.
At the same time, Peter welcomes tokenization as a practical way to make physical assets more usable - especially gold - and he plugs his own tokenization plan while warning that most current activity is tokenizing dollars or stablecoins, not metal:
I like tokenization, I get that, and especially with gold; I mean, I think gold lends itself to tokenization extremely well. That's why I set up tgold.com and I would encourage your listeners to get an account set up and get ready to go and own some gold and silver that I will be able to tokenize and you'll be able to put into your wallet. In fact, CZ is excited about listing my token on Binance, so we'll get a lot of liquidity in there in addition to the safety of gold. But most of the tokenization that is going on now is with dollars and stable coins. If they have a choice between tokenized gold and tokenized dollars, I think tokenized gold would win hands down.
Peter turns to the metals markets and lays out why silver could be the sleeper play of the cycle while warning about the fragile, leveraged nature of the Bitcoin market - and the concentration risks for big corporate Bitcoin holders:
I don't think there's some kind of cabal of short sellers in silver, but there have been a lot of shorts, and clearly they must be covering now because silver has been on a tear this year; I expect silver to go a lot higher and I think we could see a hundred dollar silver by next year.
Finally, he paints a pragmatic picture of how banks and brokerages will treat tokenized assets: they'll custody tokenized gold, charge fees, and lend against it the way they would any asset - which is a feature for gold but a potential catastrophe for lenders who try the same with Bitcoin:
I think banks and brokerage firms certainly could hold tokenized gold for their customers so they can keep it in-house, and maybe they'll add their own fees to it because they're not going to do it for nothing. They're going to have to find a way to make some money off of it and they may certainly lend against it.... I can liquidate that gold and I've covered everything. Whereas with Bitcoin, it's that the lenders could lose a lot of money because the market could implode on them before they have a chance to sell.
This article was originally published on SchiffGold.com.