Former President Donald Trump took Bitcoin into his crosshairs on June 7, calling the blockchain-based cryptocurrency a “scam” that threatens the greenback’s dominance as the world’s chief reserve currency.
“Bitcoin, it just seems like a scam,” Trump told Fox Business’s Stuart Varney in an interview.
“I don’t like it because it’s another currency competing against the dollar. … I want the dollar to be the currency of the world. That’s what I’ve always said.”
Trump in 2019 directed similarly harsh criticism against Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, writing on Twitter that he’s “not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air.”
The idea that Bitcoin’s utility as a currency is limited has been echoed by “Black Swan” author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who told CNBC in an April interview that he was “fooled” into thinking it could be a viable alternative to central bank-issued fiat currency before coming to the conclusion that its volatility makes it “just speculation,” a “game,” and a “Ponzi scheme” run out in the open.
“I bought into it … wanting to have an alternative to the fiat currency issued by central banks—a currency without a government,” Taleb said. “I realized it was not a currency without a government. It was just pure speculation. It’s just like a game.
“You don’t replace the currency with something that’s so volatile that you can’t really commit to a transaction in it.”
“Something that moves 5 percent a day, 20 percent in a month—up or down—cannot be a currency. It’s something else,” said Taleb, a former derivatives trader.
After a dizzying bull run that took off in December 2020 and saw Bitcoin’s price surge to around $64,000 in April, the cryptocurrency has seen a sharp selloff and, at the time of reporting, was trading at around $36,000.
BY TOM OZIMEK
