Back in September 2017, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of J.P Morgan called Bitcoin a fraud. He said,“It’s just not a real thing, eventually it will be closed. If you’re stupid enough to buy it, you’ll pay the price for it one day.” But after seeing the highs and lows of Bitcoin in 2017, he has changed his opinion about the cryptocurrency. Recently on Fox Business, he said that “the blockchain is real” and that he regrets calling bitcoin a fraud.
Even though he said he regrets saying those words, he still has some reservations about the cryptocurrency. He said he is not sure how the governments are going to keep it under control once the bitcoins get really big. This is a concern that is shared by a huge number of people since the currency has gone up over 1500 percent within the past year.
Dimon is not the only one who has this controversial opinion about bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Morgan Stanley analyst James Faucette also stated publically that the real worth of Bitcoin is zero and that it cannot be considered a currency since it doesn’t associate an interest rate with it. He said that since only a few retailers accept the payments in bitcoins, therefore, it won’t be long when its worth will decline to zero.
Economist Joseph Stiglitz said that bitcoin should be outlawed. According to him, crypto is not serving any useful social function and can be easily taken down by any regularity authority. There are a lot of reasons to be against the cryptocurrency as a concept. For example, mining cryptocurrency consumes more energy than consumed by all individual countries in the world. There is a lot of gap between the currency and the consumer use in a retail environment. However, there is also a chance that cryptocurrencies can contribute to a sustainable living and advanced technologies that contribute to saving lives one day.