Peter Schiff Blasts CNBC for Favoring Bitcoin to Gold

Peter Schiff, a noted cryptocurrency basher and gold promoter, has attributed the recent rally of Bitcoin to the level of attention that the asset has gotten from mainstream media.

Bitcoin’s price shot up over the past 24 hours, with many believing that a major catalyst of this has been the fall of the yuan, Chinas official currency. The asset shot up by more than $1,200 over the weekend, while the yuan dropped to just above 7 per a single dollar; a trough not seen in almost a decade.

However, on Monday, Schiff took to Twitter to express his opinions, claiming that contrary to what many were saying, the fresh interest that Bitcoin has gotten from people who want to buy cryptocurrency has nothing to do with any events impacting the Chinese economy.

In his tweet, he trumped the notion that the Chinese have suddenly started to but Bitcoin, adding that it is speculators within the United States that have started to eat up the asset, based on bets that the Chinese will buy it as a safe haven. According to Schiff, the drop in the yuan created an avenue for speculative traders to squeeze markets and introduce further price volatility.

He went on to take a swipe at popular news medium CNBC, claiming that they had made a habit of appropriating a disproportionate amount of time to covering the price movements of Bitcoin, as opposed to other asset classes (of course, he meant gold)

He tweeted, “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.”

While Schiffs comments seemed to be more about his frustration as to why gold trading not getting as much attention from mainstream media as Bitcoin, it does ring slightly true nonetheless. Investors look to media houses before making decisions most of the time, and getting more attention means that Bitcoin could seem like a more viable investment than gold.

In a world where traditional stock trading portfolios and fiat currencies seem to be unstable, alternative asset classes are vying for the attention of both individual and institutional attention. It stands to reason that whichever is in the faces of investors the most will thrive.

However, it is also worth noting that media houses might not particularly love crypto as much as Schiff would want people to believe. Last week, tech analysis firm Comparitech published a report detailing how various information sources disseminate talk of crypto assets. While the report revealed an increase in crypto discussion on Reddit, it also showed that the perception of these assets from mainstream media isn’t as great.

In the analysis, Comparitech divided articles into positive and negative sentiments. While Reddit scored an 85 percent positivity rating, a vast majority of media outlets leaned towards the negative side.

The report showed that the Huffington Post, Business Insider, and the International Business Times were the most popular crypto bashing media outlets, as they each posted about twice as many negative crypto stories as they did positive ones. Forbes was the one anomaly to this trend, as 80 percent of the crypto stories posted here were positive.