The billionaire won’t ‘dramatically’ increase the value of bitcoin.
Former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel has raised doubts that the future price of Bitcoin (BTC) could rise “dramatically” from current price levels.
The billionaire – who still owns “some” bitcoin but not as much as he “should” – is unsure where the next batch of buyers will come from because of the bitcoin “ETF issue”.
“I'm not sure it's going to go dramatically up from here. We've got an ETF issue and I don't know who else is going to buy it,” Thiel, founder of Founders Fund, told CNBC on June 28.
“Maybe still some upside, but it's going to be a volatile and crowded ride.”
New ‼️ – Billionaire Peter Thiel:-
I haven't bought as much #Bitcoin as I should have. pic.twitter.com/AtklzIw9ME
— Swan (@Swan) June 28, 2024
Thiel previously said he had an “unpaid investment” in Bitcoin in October 2021, when the cryptocurrency rallied to its previous all-time high of $69,000 three weeks later.
However, the TL Founders Fund has a very impressive history with Bitcoin, having made its first Bitcoin investment in 2014, making $1.8 billion just before the market crashed in 2022.
Founders Fund bought another $100 million in Bitcoin in 2023 when it traded below $30,000.
Bitcoin is not that cypherpunk.
Thiel explains that Bitcoin is not as cypherpunk as he first thought.
“I don't really believe in this founding vision of Bitcoin ideology as a cypherpunk, crypto-anarchist, libertarian and anti-central government thing.”
“That's what I thought was so terrifying about it,” Thiel said when he first encountered Bitcoin.
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But now he believes that Bitcoin “doesn't really work that way.”
“When people in the FBI tell me that criminals would rather use bitcoin than $100 bills, maybe it's not working the way it should.”
However, Bitcoin was designed to be a public, permissionless and decentralized ledger – and transactions were not intended to be completely untraceable like Monero and other privacy-focused networks.
Bitcoin is currently trading at $60,450, down 1.8% in the last 24 hours.
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