The trending story about the golden asteroid Psyche 16 that allegedly contains massive amounts of precious heavy metals is a “whole bunch of nonsense,” says Peter Schiff of Euro Pacific Capital.

In an exclusive interview with RT, Schiff said that while there is a metallic asteroid in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, no one could know for sure what metals it contains.

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“It is a rare metallic asteroid with a composition similar to the Earth’s core. It’s made almost entirely of an iron-nickel alloy, with small amounts of other metals, likely to include gold.”

He continued: “But I mean maybe there’s no gold there, we don’t know. They don’t have any idea, they don’t know that there’s gold on that asteroid. There could be some gold there but it would cost a fortune to mine it there.”

Schiff noted that mining most gold on Earth is too expensive, so the cost of sending miners to the asteroid and mining there would be “prohibitively expensive.”

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“It would [take] a couple of years for the miners just to get to the asteroid, it’s further than the Sun, it’s a very far trip,” he said ironically.

Schiff, who is known for having predicted the 2008 financial crash, said the whole golden asteroid story is being spread to pump up the price of bitcoin.

“It’s just BS, it’s not a scientific or economic story, and it’s just nonsense,” he said, adding: “It is being floated by the bitcoin community to try to create the false narrative that gold supply is not scarce so the price of gold is going to crash and that people should own bitcoin instead of gold because bitcoin is more scarce, because you’ll never find any bitcoin on the asteroid.”

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According to the market guru, it is possible that there could be mining of asteroids in the future, but not in our lifetime. “This is all about the future, hundreds of years, maybe thousands of years in the future before this would be going on,” said the analyst.

NASA reportedly plans a mission to Psyche 16 with the launch scheduled in early 2022. After buzzing Mars in 2023, the spacecraft is expected to arrive at the asteroid in 2026.

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