peter schiff is not an idiot, infact you have to imply reverse psychology to see his true motives..
everyone knows he is a gold hoarder, and if he was really seing a large investment return on gold, he would hoard HIS gold and get people to buy gold on gold markets to get the price to increase.
now for the reverse psychology.
if he sells you HIS GOLD then its not because he loves gold and wants you to join his love for it. its because he wants to dump his hoard. also to note by accepting bitcoins, shows that HE WANTS bitcoins. why else swap gold for bitcoins unless he secretly prefers it.
http://www.europacmetals.com/ has very low fees and doesn't sell Schiff's gold, Schiff is probably having more gold than ever
Also, while Peter Schiff is no idiot, he's also not a "great Economist" by any stretch. He's more just an ardent gold-bug with standard gold-bug arguments and rhetoric.
Anyone remember when he went on a tirade about bitcon's divisibility being the same thing as supply-inflation? That's just bad math and bad thinking (note: his brother Andrew told me in person that he doesn't know what Peter's hang up there is).
Schiff is sometimes wrong but his record is great : dotcom then housing bubble previsions, QE going to go on and get bigger or more recently when he said the price to pay for the form to renounce to your American nationality was going to go up (
http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2014/08/28/u-s-hikes-fee-to-renounce-citizenship-by-422/)
He is a business man and a good one but he is mostly an advocate of sound money and austrian economics to fight the witchcraft/wishful thinking economics of the likes of marx, keynes or nowadays thomas piketty