Former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel has expressed doubts about the likelihood of Bitcoin prices rising significantly from current levels.
The billionaire, who still owns “some” Bitcoin but not as much as he “should,” is unsure where the next wave of buyers will come from now that Bitcoin (BTC) has an “ETF version.”
“I’m not sure if it will rise that dramatically from here. The ETF edition has come out, and I don’t know who is buying it.” Thiel, founder of Founders Fund, told CNBC on June 28:
“We can probably still climb some, but it will be an unstable and bumpy journey.”
NEW! – Billionaire Peter Thiel:
I didn’t buy that much #bitcoin I should have done that. pic.twitter.com/AtklzIw9ME
— Swan (@Swan) June 28, 2024
Thiel previously said he was “underinvested” in Bitcoin in October 2021, when the cryptocurrency rallied toward its previous all-time high of $69,000, set about three weeks later.
However, Thiel’s Founders Fund has a rather impressive history with Bitcoin. He first invested in Bitcoin in 2014 and made $1.8 billion in profits just before the market crashed in 2022.
Founders Fund bought an additional $100 million worth of Bitcoin in 2023 when it was trading below $30,000.
Bitcoin is not cypherpunk
Thiel revealed that Bitcoin did not become as cypherpunk as originally thought.
“What I’m less sure about is the question of Bitcoin’s ideological founding vision as a cypherpunk, crypto-anarchist, libertarian, anti-centralized government.”
“That was the thing that struck me as really great,” Thiel recalled when he first encountered Bitcoin.
Related: Fidelity executives say most investors should have some allocation to Bitcoin.
But he now believes Bitcoin “doesn’t really work that way.”
“When the FBI says that criminals would much rather use Bitcoin than $100 bills, it probably suggests that Bitcoin is not working as expected.”
However, Bitcoin was designed as a public, permissionless distributed ledger, and transactions were not designed to be completely untraceable like those on Monero and other privacy-focused networks.
Bitcoin is currently trading at $60,450, down 1.8% over the last 24 hours.
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