Bitcoin is a hyped-up fraud. A pet rock. A waste of time.
JPMorgan (NYSE:JPM) head Jamie Dimon didn’t disguise his disdain for the world’s first and largest cryptocurrency when talking with CNBC’s Sqwark Box on Thursday.
Dimon was also sceptical of bitcoin’s scarcity of 21 million coins, which is considered one of the digital asset’s greatest attributes.
“How do you know it’s going to stop at 21 million?” he asked.
“Maybe it’s going to get to 21 million and Satoshi’s picture is going to come up and laugh at you all,” (half) joked Dimon, referring to Satoshi Nakomoto, the pseudonymous founder of bitcoin.
Dimon drew distinctions between cryptocurrency and the underlying blockchain technology, which he expressed enthusiasm for.
“Blockchain is a technology ledger system that we use to move information… we use it to move money. So that is a ledger that we think will be deployable,” he said.
Unsurprisingly, his comments drew considerable ire from the Twitterati.
“Jamie Dimon either has no clue what #Bitcoin is, or he knows exactly what it is yet ridicules and dismisses it out of pure fear of it being the ultimate disruptor to legacy banking’s core business of excessive and egregious fees,” Looking Glass co-founder James Lavish
Jamie Dimon either has no clue what #Bitcoin is, or he knows exactly what it is yet ridicules and dismisses it out of pure fear of it being the ultimate disruptor to legacy banking’s core business of excessive and egregious fees.Dimon’s comments come as little surprise given his previous comments.Which do you think it really is?
— James Lavish (@jameslavish) January 20, 2023
In a September 2022 recent congressional hearing, he labelled all cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, “decentralised Ponzi schemes”.
“I’m a major skeptic of crypto tokens, which you call currency, like Bitcoin,” Dimon told the Democrat-led House Financial Services Committee, although he did concede that collateralisd stablecoins pegged to the US dollar wouldn’t be problematic with the proper regulation.
In 2017, Dimon threatened to fire any trader who bought or sold crypto assets on the grounds of being “stupid.”
Not all of his contemporaries are as bearish on digital currencies.
In August 2022, BlackRock (NYSE:BLK), the world’s largest asset manager with some US$10tn in assets under management, announced plans for a spot Bitcoin trust for institutional investors through a partnership with NASDAQ-listed crypto exchange Coinbase (NASDAQ:COIN).
Around the same time, Charles Schwab (NYSE:NYSE:SCHW), the US broker and investments group, launched an exchange-traded fund aimed at giving exposure to companies that are focused on servicing the cryptocurrency markets.
Even Gary Gensler, the hawkish chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, has a less extreme view of bitcoin.
Gensler widely considers cryptocurrencies to be unregistered securities, and has pursued numerous legal battles to prove his point (most recently against Nexo), though he has previously conceded that bitcoin (BTC) is a commodity and should be exempt from securities laws.