Recently, prominent gold advocate Peter Schiff took to social media to challenge the popular idea that Bitcoin serves as an inflation-proof ledger for preserving economic value.
Is Bitcoin Truly a Battery?
Schiff’s critique targets the narrative promoted by MicroStrategy’s CEO Michael Saylor and other staunch Bitcoin supporters.
Saylor frequently describes money as a form of “economic energy.” The concept is that when you work, you expend energy, and when compensated, you effectively store that energy for future use.
He contends that traditional fiat currencies tend to dissipate this stored energy over time, while gold is cumbersome to move. In contrast, Bitcoin acts like “digital energy,” functioning as a battery that retains your economic effort without degradation and can be transferred almost instantly across distances.
This bullish perspective isn’t unique to Saylor. Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk recently echoed similar sentiments on a podcast, calling Bitcoin a “currency grounded in fundamental physics” due to its direct relationship with energy consumption. Musk also speculated about the eventual obsolescence of money itself in a future shaped by artificial intelligence and robotics within a post-scarcity society.
The Opposing Viewpoint
However, critics point out an important flaw: once electricity is used in mining Bitcoin, it cannot be reclaimed from the digital asset itself. The power consumed during mining disappears permanently at creation. If electrical infrastructure fails, owning one bitcoin provides no usable power — exactly Schiff’s argument highlighting how it does not literally store any retrievable energy.
By comparison, extracting gold also demands substantial amounts of fuel and electricity. Yet Schiff argues this expenditure isn’t wasted because the resulting metal has tangible industrial applications spanning electronics manufacturing, dental work, aerospace technology, and jewelry production. In essence, the inputted energy transforms into valuable physical matter rather than vanishing entirely.