Peter Schiff Slams CNBC for Giving Bitcoin More Airtime Than Gold

Bitcoin's fresh bull run this week is down to speculators betting on Chinese economic upheaval, not Chinese upheaval itself, Peter Schiff claims.

In a tweet Aug. 5, the veteran gold bug and well-known Bitcoin naysayer claimed that current events impacting the Chinese economy did not cause fresh interest in Bitcoin.

"The Chinese aren't buying Bitcoin as a safe haven. Speculators are buying, betting that the Chinese will buy it as a safe haven!" he wrote.

As Cointelegraph reported, BTC/USD has shot up over the past 24 hours, with many commentators eyeing a fall in the Chinese yuan as a major catalyst.

For Schiff those events simply provided speculative traders with another outlet for squeezing markets and introducing more volatility.

He framed his remarks as an attack on CNBC, which he claimed spent a disproportionate amount of time on Bitcoin's movements at the expense of assets such as gold.

"CNBC is trying its best to dupe its audience into buying Bitcoin. Despite gold being a much larger market, CNBC devotes far more airtime to Bitcoin," he tweeted.

The perspective is curious, Schiff just last week appearing in an hour-long dedicated debate on the pros and cons of gold versus Bitcoin.

For his part, Pompliano said that Schiff should be 100% certain of Bitcoin's lack of value, or he would regret lambasting instead of investing in it.

Schiff in fact owns at least 0.21 BTC, which he said he would keep after Pompliano inadvertently caused around 100 people to send him free coins in a bid to change his mind.