Comparing the Bitcoin gold rush to the Dutch Tulip Mania that affected that industry in the 1600s, JPMorgan Chase CEO called the cryptocurrency a fraud that was going to ‘get someone killed’.
Bitcoin has been at forefront of controversy recently after China banned not only ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) which offers start-ups a way to generate capital through cryptocurrencies, but also started cracking down on so-called ‘illegal’ Bitcoin exchanges. This has put immense strain on the value of the digital currency, which has reached stratospheric prices recently.
Even with the price relatively high, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon chimed in with his opinion at a recent interview during the Delivering Alpha Conference. Dimon called the new digital currency a ‘fraud’ and that it wasn’t ‘a real thing’. At a separate conference earlier that day, he further went on to compare it to ‘Tulip Mania’ that affected the Dutch tulip industry during the 1630s:
According to Dimon, his daughter bought Bitcoin and when the price subsequently surged “she thought she was a genius”, although his advice does not suggest people buy $100,000 worth of Bitcoin and short it until it goes down. The term ‘short’ roughly refers to an investor ‘borrowing’ an asset expecting it to devalue, so they can profit in the near term.
Dimon further went on to say that he’d fire an employee in a second if they were caught trading Bitcoin, since it was against the company’s rules. Bitcoin plummeted even further after Dimon’s comments, and as of publishing the currency is trading at $3,808 per Bitcoin, in stark comparison, it reached $5,000 per coin earlier this month.
