Bitcoin is trading above $107,000. The broader crypto market is euphoric. And one veteran analyst is calling for a collapse that would wipe out more than 90% of its value.
Peter Schiff, the gold-obsessed economist and longtime Bitcoin skeptic, isn’t backing down from his prediction that the world’s largest cryptocurrency will eventually plummet to $10,000. In fact, he’s doubling down. In a recent post on X, Schiff responded to critics who mocked his earlier bearish call by insisting the crash simply hasn’t happened yet — but will. “Bitcoin hasn’t gone to $10K yet,” Schiff wrote. “But it will.” No hedging. No qualifiers. Just conviction, the kind that has made him either a prophet-in-waiting or a cautionary tale about stubbornness, depending on which side of the trade you sit on.
As Yahoo Finance reported, Schiff’s latest remarks came as Bitcoin surged past $106,000, setting fresh highs and making his prediction look increasingly detached from reality. The cryptocurrency has gained roughly 50% year to date, buoyed by spot Bitcoin ETF inflows, institutional adoption, and a macroeconomic backdrop that — despite persistent inflation fears — has kept risk appetite alive. Schiff, who has been bearish on Bitcoin for essentially its entire existence, frames the rally as a speculative mania destined to end badly.
The timing is awkward for the bears. Bitcoin broke above $107,000 in late May 2025, fueled by a combination of factors that have given bulls ammunition at every turn. MicroStrategy, now rebranded as Strategy, continues to accumulate Bitcoin at a staggering pace. CEO Michael Saylor has become the de facto mascot of corporate Bitcoin treasury strategy, and his company holds more than 568,000 BTC — a position worth north of $60 billion at current prices. Spot Bitcoin ETFs in the United States, led by BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust, have attracted tens of billions in cumulative net inflows since their January 2024 launch. The demand picture, on its face, looks nothing like a market preparing to collapse.
But Schiff’s argument has never really been about near-term price action. It’s structural. He believes Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, that it derives its price entirely from speculation and the greater fool theory, and that when sentiment turns — as it inevitably does — there will be nothing to catch the fall. Gold, by contrast, has thousands of years of history as a store of value, industrial use cases, and central bank demand. That’s the Schiff thesis in a nutshell, and it hasn’t changed in a decade.
What has changed is the market’s willingness to listen.
In 2021, when Bitcoin crashed from $69,000 to below $16,000, Schiff looked prescient. Briefly. The recovery that followed — powered by ETF approvals, the Bitcoin halving in April 2024, and a wave of institutional legitimacy — erased those losses and then some. Bitcoin’s current price is more than six times its 2022 bear market low. For Schiff’s $10,000 target to hit, Bitcoin would need to fall roughly 91% from current levels. That’s not impossible — Bitcoin has experienced drawdowns of 80% or more in previous cycles — but the market structure today is fundamentally different from earlier eras.
The presence of spot ETFs changes the calculus. When retail investors held Bitcoin primarily through unregulated exchanges and self-custody wallets, panic selling could cascade quickly. Now, a significant chunk of Bitcoin’s float sits in ETF wrappers managed by firms like BlackRock, Fidelity, and Invesco. These vehicles introduce a layer of institutional inertia. Redemptions happen, but they don’t happen the same way a leveraged trader getting liquidated on Binance does. The plumbing is different.
Schiff dismisses this distinction. On X, he has repeatedly argued that ETF inflows represent speculative demand, not genuine adoption, and that the same investors piling in today will flee at the first sign of trouble. There’s a kernel of truth there. ETF flows are notoriously momentum-driven. When Bitcoin dropped sharply in early 2025, several spot ETFs saw net outflows for weeks. But the rebound was swift, and the flows reversed. The buy-the-dip mentality, at least for now, remains intact.
The macro picture adds another layer of complexity. The Federal Reserve has held interest rates steady through much of 2025, caught between sticky inflation and slowing growth. Bitcoin, which was supposed to be an inflation hedge, has instead traded more like a high-beta risk asset — rallying when equities rally, selling off during risk-off episodes. That correlation has weakened somewhat in recent months, with Bitcoin outperforming the S&P 500 during May’s equity pullback, but it hasn’t disappeared entirely. If the U.S. economy tips into recession — a scenario Schiff has also been predicting — the question is whether Bitcoin would act as a safe haven or get sold alongside everything else.
History suggests the latter. During the COVID crash of March 2020, Bitcoin fell 50% in a single day before recovering. During the 2022 bear market, it declined alongside tech stocks as the Fed hiked rates aggressively. The “digital gold” narrative is compelling in theory but has yet to hold up consistently under stress.
And yet.
Bitcoin keeps coming back. Every cycle, the obituaries get written, the skeptics take their victory laps, and then the price recovers to new highs. This pattern — boom, bust, higher boom — has repeated four times now. Schiff’s fundamental critique hasn’t changed, but the market’s response to it has. Each cycle brings in a new cohort of holders who view drawdowns as buying opportunities rather than existential threats. The HODLer base, as crypto enthusiasts call it, grows larger and more resilient with each iteration.
The counterargument to Schiff is simple: if Bitcoin were going to zero — or $10,000, which amounts to the same thing in psychological terms — it would have done so already. It has survived exchange collapses (Mt. Gox, FTX), regulatory crackdowns (China’s mining ban), internal civil wars (the block size debate), and multiple 80%+ drawdowns. Each time, the network continued to function, new participants entered, and the price eventually recovered. Sixteen years of survival doesn’t guarantee permanence, but it makes the zero thesis harder to sustain with each passing year.
Schiff would counter that longevity proves nothing about value. Plenty of speculative manias lasted years before collapsing. The Dutch tulip bubble. The South Sea Company. He sees Bitcoin as the latest entry in that historical ledger, distinguished only by its duration and the fervor of its adherents.
The debate, at its core, is about what constitutes value. Schiff defines it through physical utility and historical precedent. Bitcoin proponents define it through network effects, mathematical scarcity, and censorship resistance. These are fundamentally different frameworks, and no amount of price action in either direction will resolve the disagreement. If Bitcoin goes to $200,000, Schiff will say the bubble got bigger. If it crashes to $50,000, bulls will say it’s a buying opportunity. Both sides have unfalsifiable conviction.
What’s notable about the current moment is how little attention Schiff’s prediction is getting from institutional players. Five years ago, a prominent economist calling for a 90% decline might have rattled markets. Today, the response from professional investors ranges from amusement to indifference. The reason is straightforward: the institutional infrastructure around Bitcoin has matured to the point where a $10,000 price target feels like a relic from a different era. BlackRock doesn’t launch an ETF for an asset it expects to lose 90% of its value. Neither does Fidelity. Or Goldman Sachs, which has been expanding its crypto trading desk.
None of which means Bitcoin can’t fall sharply. It can. It has. A black swan event — a major stablecoin collapse, a coordinated global regulatory ban, a catastrophic bug in the Bitcoin protocol — could trigger a cascade that tests even the most committed holders. But the $10,000 target requires something more than a garden-variety bear market. It requires an existential crisis for the entire asset class, the kind that permanently destroys confidence and sends institutional capital fleeing for good.
Schiff believes that crisis is coming. The market, emphatically, does not.
So who’s right? The honest answer is that nobody knows. Bitcoin has defied predictions in both directions for its entire existence. It was supposed to die a thousand times. It was also supposed to hit $100,000 by 2021 — and didn’t, until late 2024. The only consistent truth about Bitcoin price predictions is that they’re consistently wrong, regardless of which direction they point.
For now, the price speaks loudest. Bitcoin above $107,000. Gold above $3,200. Both at or near all-time highs. In Schiff’s world, only one of those numbers is real. The market, characteristically, disagrees.