The room suddenly fell silent—when the die-hard gold advocate who had just finished criticizing Bitcoin was handed a real gold bar, his first reaction was: "The color doesn’t look quite right, I’ll need to have it assayed."

It was a rather ironic scene.

A textbook-level moment took place at a recent major blockchain week debate: the founder of a leading exchange faced off against Wall Street’s well-known “Bitcoin skeptic” Peter Schiff. One believes in digital gold, the other only trusts physical gold bars. They sparred over everything from intrinsic value to payment properties, and sparks were flying.

But the real bombshell wasn’t the debate itself—it was Schiff’s live revelation: he’s working on a gold tokenization project.

That’s right—the veteran who’s spent over a decade trashing Bitcoin admitted, “From a monetary perspective, tokenized gold is indeed much more usable than gold bars—it’s more portable, divisible, and transfers faster.” By saying this, he basically acknowledged one fact: digitization does make assets more like “money.”

Still, he stuck to his guns: Bitcoin has no intrinsic value and is propped up purely by belief.

His opponent didn’t miss a beat, pulling out a 1-kilogram gold bar worth around $130,000 and slamming it on the table. Schiff examined it for a long moment before coming out with that classic response.

That moment laid bare the Achilles’ heel of physical assets: you need to assay them, store them, and find people to trade with. And Bitcoin? It can be verified in seconds and transferred globally with no barriers.

On the fundamental question of “what truly counts as value,” the two remain in parallel universes.