CZ Mocks Peter Schiff's Bearish Calls Dating Back to 2011

Update 11:55 UTC: The roughly three-minute video gathers 13 years of his TV and podcast appearances, in which he labels the asset "tulip mania 2.0," a "pure Ponzi" and "digital fool's gold," with his calls plotted at levels from about $355 in 2013 to over $111,000 in 2025.

Zhao's reply to Pete Rizzo

Changpeng Zhao (CZ), the founder of Binance, mocked gold advocate Peter Schiff's long record of bearish Bitcoin calls in a short reply on X on Monday, writing: “He will be right one day... after he changes his mind :)”. Zhao was responding to a compilation from Bitcoin historian Pete Rizzo that gathered Schiff's numerous pessimistic predictions over the years, and the exchange of posts pushed the gold bull's long-running criticism of the world's largest cryptocurrency back into the spotlight. That skepticism runs deep. Schiff, an economist who has spent much of his public career promoting gold as the superior store of value, dismissed the emerging Bitcoin market as a fad as far back as 2011. He sharpened the argument in November 2013, when the asset traded around $350: likening its explosive growth to the notorious Dutch tulip mania, he argued in a CNBC interview that the speculative run would eventually collapse. A massive correction did follow, but the market recovered and went on to set new all-time highs, the first of many occasions on which price action moved directly against his forecasts. Every cycle since has produced a similar call at a higher price, extending the same ledger of misses. The dynamic Zhao's reply pokes at is familiar to anyone who has followed this debate: Schiff's bear market warnings arrive in every cycle, each one framed as the moment the experiment finally breaks, and each has so far been followed by the asset printing higher levels rather than lower ones. Rizzo's compilation, by grouping those calls in one place, handed the Binance founder an easy target for a single line. Zhao's reply carried no chart and no price target, only a smiley and a verdict on the predictor, and it needed nothing more to make its point.

The compilation itself contains the sharpest moment: its final clip shows Schiff conceding he cannot explain what keeps Bitcoin afloat. The roughly three-minute video gathers 13 years of his TV and podcast appearances, in which he labels the asset "tulip mania 2.0," a "pure Ponzi" and "digital fool's gold," with his calls plotted at levels from about $355 in 2013 to over $111,000 in 2025. Later on Thursday, the price had eased to near $82,500, close to the level Schiff found puzzling.

@cz_binance · X post

A short reply on X.

View on X

Tulips, $20,000 and $100,000

The calls Rizzo gathered span more than a decade of market history. In December 2017, with Bitcoin nearing $20,000 for the first time, Schiff called it the largest speculative bubble he had ever seen. He pronounced the asset dead during the March 2020 crash. A rare concession followed in 2021: he admitted his earlier prediction that BTC would never reach $50,000 had been wrong after the price soared above that mark, a level many who chose to hodl through the drawdowns had waited years to see. Even so, he held to the conclusion that mattered more to him, that the asset would end up worthless. In February 2021 he wrote: “While possible for there to be a temporary rise to $100K, it's inevitable there will be a permanent fall to zero.” Bitcoin went on to clear $100,000 in December 2024, closing out several of those forecasts at once and putting the market far above the levels at which most of the warnings had been issued. The pattern across those calls is hard to miss: a collapse was scheduled in every cycle, and each deadline passed without the asset disappearing. The bearish calls did not stop there. In April 2025, Schiff predicted that the next financial crisis would kill the asset, writing that the network was born out of the 2008 crisis and that, ironically, a financial crisis in 2025 would be its death. Earlier this year, though, he appeared to soften one of his most controversial positions. In a June 2026 debate with Bitcoin bull Anthony Pompliano, Schiff admitted the chances of the asset falling to zero were probably slim, saying: “It's not going to go to zero. Maybe.” He later explained that he still expected a drop of more than 99% in market capitalization, and that even a surviving network trading at a positive value would leave most people with heavy losses on their investment.

What the scoreboard shows

The primary record here is short: a one-line post from Zhao, quoted above, answering a compilation of Schiff's own words. An economist who dismissed the asset at $350 in 2013, called a bubble at $20,000 in 2017 and forecast zero in 2021 has since watched the market set an all-time high above $100,000. Our Bitcoin technical analysis desk reads the same pattern on the chart: repeated drawdowns, none of them terminal. The June 2026 concession matters as much as the jab: the debate has shifted from survival to the depth of a hypothetical crash. Our related coverage of the asset trailing a record $125 trillion in global M2 fills in the macro side. And we covered the asset climbing back above $80,000 after an inflation-driven slide, so the price side of the story keeps moving faster than either side's script.