‘Binance is a casino’: Did Peter Schiff dominate debate with CZ at BBW 2025?

Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao and pro-gold American economist Peter Schiff took the centre stage at Binance Blockchain Week 2025 to debate on what makes for a better investment option – Bitcoin or tokenized gold.During the debate, Schiff outrightly called Binance a casino, that has been shipping the idea of Bitcoin, which he said has no intrinsic value in itself.

Both, CZ and Schiff, put forward points to support their allegiance to their respectively preferred assets. Schiff, however, took a more harsh approach towards BTC than CZ did towards gold.

“Nothing is priced in BTC,” Schiff quipped. “They are people buying and selling Bitcoin to each other without any work being done, without any goods being purchased, right? You know, because you use it like gambler, or gambling, etc. 300 million people on Binance alone have some kind of Bitcoin. You’re running a pretty big casino. It’s a big pyramid, but, you know, it’s not going to encompass the entire world.”

Responding to the rather bold statement, CZ said that Binance – a licensed entity in over 30 international jurisdictions – cannot be classified as a casino given that millions of people are engaging with only because they see value in Bitcoin.

As per Schiff, there are other tokens floating in the market as well, that can perform all the tasks that BTC could. He said from cross-border transactions to travelling around the world with one uniform currency – multiple other tokens could serve this purpose and they are all competing in the same financial market as BTC.

With this point, Schiff insinuated that it could be any day that another asset similar to BTC emerges in the market – that could cause risks to investors. Opposed to BTC, Schiff noted, buying gold – whether tokenized or physical – would always keep a redeemable asset with the investors – proving to be a better investment option.

Replying to Schiff, CZ explained that the reason BTC is the reigning king of the crypto sector – because “it already already has a large community supporting it.”

Regardless, Schiff remained rooted to his point that the reason BTC is being promoted as “digital gold” is because it could not prove itself to be a “digital currency” of real value.

“BTC doesn’t work very well as a currency. So they said, Okay, well, it’s digital gold. Well, it’s not digital gold either, because it’s nothing like gold, right? It’s not, you know, I can’t make a picture of a hamburger and then say I have digital food. It’s just an image of a hamburger,” Schiff said, adding that BTC cannot be used as a store of value.

CZ asked Schiff what he though would younger investors prefer in the next few years – BTC or gold. To this, Schiff confidently predicted gold saying – “because by then their friends would have lost a lot of money in Bitcoin.”

Schiff concluded his argument saying Bitcoin will probably not be able to compete with gold because the people who have gold have no reason to sell it to buy Bitcoin.

“They gonna try to sell their Bitcoin and get back into gold. But that’s gonna be a big problem, because there’s no buyers for Bitcoin,” Schiff said.

In the end, Schiff invited CZ to collaborate on bringing gold on-chain in the times to come.