Last year at the Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas, Peter Schiff urged attendees to sell their BTC holdings. At the time, Bitcoin was trading near $110,000 amid strong enthusiasm for companies accumulating Bitcoin on their balance sheets.
Now, as the 2026 conference takes place, BTC is near $77,000. Schiff argues that this decline shows the new narrative being promoted at this year’s event is unlikely to support higher prices.
What Schiff Said Then, What He’s Saying Now, and Why the Gap Matters
At the 2025 conference, Schiff took the stage and told the audience to sell. The crowd was focused on the idea that publicly traded companies buying and holding Bitcoin would continue pushing the price upward.
One year later the asset is down roughly 30%. The prevailing pitch at the 2026 event is “digital credit,” which Schiff says will also fail to lift prices.
“Last year, the hype was Bitcoin treasury companies near the peak,” he wrote on X. “This year, it’s digital credit, which will soon blow up.”
Schiff also examined the market share of Strategy’s Bitcoin accumulation. A year ago, the company owned about 2.76% of the total supply. Today that figure is roughly 3.9%—a near 40% increase in market share—yet the price has still dropped. Schiff’s point is simple: if a substantial buyer like Strategy can expand its holdings materially and the price can still fall, why would further accumulation necessarily prevent future declines?
Strategy has continued to buy Bitcoin. On the day the conference began, the firm acquired an additional 3,273 BTC for approximately $255 million, bringing its total to 818,334 BTC purchased for around $61.8 billion at an average cost of about $75,500 per BTC.
Schiff has also criticized Strategy’s STRC preferred stock. In an X Space on April 23, he called STRC “an obvious Ponzi scheme” and spent about two hours outlining his reasons.
His argument centers on STRC’s 11.5% annual yield, distributed monthly in cash. Schiff contends that Strategy’s software business does not produce enough operating income to fund that yield, prompting the question of where the payments originate.
“The 11.5% yield on STRC is paid by selling more shares of STRC, and then you get money from new investors to pay old investors,” he claimed.
Schiff’s Critics Have a Long Memory
Responses on X were swift and often hostile. Trader Mr. Anderson posted screenshots of past warnings from Schiff dating back to November 2013, when he advised against Bitcoin at about $764.
The thread highlighted additional warnings at prices such as $566, $3,870, $4,023, $7,220, and $5,341. From each of those levels, Bitcoin subsequently rose many times over.
“You said that from $700 to $126K,” the post noted. “To say, ‘I was right’ after all that tells us everything we need to know about your opinion.”
Analyst Josh Mandell offered a different critique: “You can’t take credit for telling people to take profits on something you never suggested they buy in the first place.”
At the conference on April 28, Michael Saylor argued the market may be headed for a supply shock. He suggested that $20 billion to $100 billion in new bank credit could flow into Bitcoin over the next 12 months from institutions such as J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, Schwab, Morgan Stanley, and Barclays, compared with roughly $10 billion of BTC he cited as “naturally available for sale.”
Saylor’s conclusion was that such inflows would push prices higher, boosting Bitcoin treasury stocks and increasing demand for digital credit products.