You may be surprised to hear that PayPal’s former CEO, Bill Harris, doesn’t like bitcoin much. He has called it the biggest pump and dump in history, a scam that he says is going a whole lot lower. ‘There’s just no value there.’ It’s a cult, he states, that is not useful, globally accepted, secure, free, fast… or anything else that its proponents claim.
Harris goes up against crypto industry giant Brian Kelly, who does a pretty good job of stating the case for the technology – which, he admits, does need to develop. But that’s where the investment opportunity lies.
Harris is an old-paradigm thinker who is viscerally opposed to crypto. We already have digital currencies, he says, which are more secure and stable. They’re called the US dollar, Chinese Yuan, and so on.
Here at Inferno, we are enthusiastic contrarians. We have seen a long bear market, which has brought critics out of the woodwork – claiming that the fall in price justifies their skepticism. What’s jaw-dropping about Harris going so publicly on the record about bitcoin is that he comes from Silicon Valley and the e-payments industry. More recent PayPal execs have been far more open to bitcoin and blockchain technology. But Harris evidently cannot break out of his existing framework of very conventional thinking.
His comments came at a time when bitcoin was trading at a local low, bumping along at the $6,000 mark and looking like it might crash a whole lot lower. It has since recovered. Harris may just have encapsulated the bearish pessimism that characterises the point before a reversal. We won’t know until a little way down the line, but in forecasting bitcoin’s demise, he may actually just have called the bottom.
You can see the discussion at
.https://twitter.com/cnbcfastmoney/status/1029486423035011080
- cnbcfastmoney
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