I just saw the exchange between Peter Schiff and Michael Saylor about Bitcoin, and Saylor’s response makes a lot of sense when you analyze it carefully.

Schiff took his numbers from the last five years: Bitcoin only increased by 12%, while the Nasdaq was 57.4%, the S&P 500 59.4%, gold 163%, and silver 181%. At first glance, it seems Bitcoin lagged behind, right? But here’s where the key point Michael Saylor raises comes into play.

The problem with that comparison is the timeframe. Schiff chose five years, but that’s quite arbitrary. If you change the starting point, everything changes. From August 2020 onward, Bitcoin has consistently been the top-performing mainstream asset. And it’s not by a small margin; the difference is very clear.

Michael Saylor emphasizes that the further back you look, the larger that gap becomes in favor of Bitcoin. It’s as if Schiff deliberately chose a period where Bitcoin didn’t look so good. But that doesn’t truly reflect the asset’s history over longer timeframes.

This is something many people don’t understand: timing matters a lot in these comparisons. If someone tells you Bitcoin hasn’t performed well, they’re probably using a starting point that was unfavorable for Bitcoin. Michael Saylor is right to point out that the temporal context is crucial for any serious analysis.

The reality is that Bitcoin has proven to be resilient over extended periods. Anyone who has been in Bitcoin for years knows that these debates about relative performance heavily depend on where you draw the line. That’s why it’s important not to fall for cherry-picking data.