Jordan Belfort, the man whose life inspired the film by director Martin Scorsese and who starred Leonardo DiCaprio, said the cryptocurrency is a "great scam of the highest level"
Jordan Belfort, the man whose life inspired the movie "The Wolf of Wall Street," said on Friday that Bitcoin is a "bubble almost guaranteed to burst."
"The promoters are perpetuating a massive swindle of the highest level against all," he told the Financial Times newspaper. "Probably 85 percent of people do not have bad intentions, but the problem is that five or ten percent are trying to cheat."
Belfort was a former stockbroker who managed a handling call center that managed to raise more than 100 million dollars and took him to jail.
Years later, he wrote a memoir of his experiences that was adapted to the cinema by the famous director Martin Scorsese. In the film, his personality was played by Leonardo DiCaprio.
For Belfort, the value of bitcoin will rise in the short term but will surely fall in the long run. "I think it's a big danger right now that people are seeing this as the next big thing, no doubt it's a bubble," he told CNN.
He also compared the cryptocurrency with the "tulip mania" of the seventeenth century in the Netherlands, where the value of the tulips skyrocketed until it finally collapsed.
"The next stage, they will see it really shot, there will be a little squeeze, it will rise even more and then it will eventually collapse, it's almost a guarantee," he said.
"If you were the most disciplined person and went in and out, there would probably be a short window to earn some money, but that's not human nature, people come in and earn some money and want to make more money," he added.
In reference to the debut of bitcoin in the futures market of the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) last Sunday, Belfort said that the bubble of tulips also burst when it began trading on the stock market.
"In the tulip bubble, the beginning of the end was when they began to quote futures on tulips, that was another upward movement and suddenly it collapsed and it was over," he said.