(The Decrypting Story) - Think "financial conference" and you can almost conjure up an image of old men in black and blue suits, falling half asleep in dim, air conditioner-cooled rooms, as someone on the stage drones on and on about something or the other using an outdated PowerPoint presentation.
That isn't the case at crypto conferences though. True, crypto does not exactly fit into the financial services hemisphere of things, but some of the people who dismissed bitcoin back in 2016-2017 when it was starting to gain traction were people from the financial services sector.
Such as JPMorgan CEO, Jamie Dimon, who likened the bitcoin craze to the 17th-century Dutch tulipmania. Since then, he has backtracked on his views around bitcoin a little, given how the interest in bitcoin has sustained.
Bad call, but it happens.
Billionaire investor Peter Thiel can't seem to forgive Dimon and some of his ilk though and he made this quite evident at a Miami cryptocurrency conference on Thursday where he reportedly tore up $100 notes, and threw cash into the crowd — something that he apparently did at a VC pitch meeting for PayPal in its early days.
In a presentation that the annals of history will record as "sensational", Thiel called out the US bank's CEO, as well as BlackRock's Larry Fink and Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett saying they were "ENEMY NUMBER ONE" in the world of cryptocurrency.
He went so far as to call Buffett "the sociopathic grandpa from Omaha" — a spin on the "Oracle of Omaha", a title conferred to Buffett, a genius investor. Buffett and Berkshire's Charlie Munger have always been vocal about their scepticism around bitcoin and crypto.
Worth noting though that Berkshire invested about a billion dollars in Nubank, a Brazil fintech startup that's popular among crypto investors.
Thiel then threw up a picture of Dimon, Buffett and Fink with the words "gerontocracy" stamped across it — the implication being they were ancient and propagated political and institutional biases against bitcoin.
"The central banks are bankrupt. We are at the end of the fiat money regime," he said, adding, "Bitcoin is the most honest market in the world."
He then said investors ballyhooing blockchain technology, but disparaging bitcoin are making political choices.
"When they choose not to allocate to bitcoin, that’s a deeply political choice."
After denigrating financial companies, he targetted tech companies next, saying "woke" companies are, in some capacity or the other, controlled by the government but crypto will never be.
"Woke companies are sort of quasi-controlled by the government in a way that Bitcoin never will be," Thiel said.
Thiel bought hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bitcoin through his VC firm Founders Fund back in 2018, and has reportedly said at several conferences, including the latest Miami conference, that he wished he'd bought more.
By Aparajita Saxena
April 8, 2022
