With Bitcoin coming up at $7,400 this past week, more prominent public figures are expressing negative opinions on the actual viability of the digital currency.
After JP Morgan Chase’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, and the Chairman and Founder of Bridgewater Associates, Ray Dalio, called bitcoin a “fraud” and a “pyramid scheme”, the next CEO who put Bitcoin on fire is Tidjane Thiam, the CEO of Credit Suisse.
As Bloomberg reported Mr. Thiam’s opinion on the “people’s currency”:
“From what we can identify, the only reason today to buy or sell bitcoin is to make money, which is the very definition of speculation and the very definition of a bubble. He added that in the history of finance, such speculation has “rarely led to a happy end.”
Rumors about Amazon launching its own cryptocurrency and the fact that CME is creating bitcoin futures to be active by the end of this year, the price of Bitcoin went through the roof, with it closing above $7,400 on Friday, November 3rd.
However, Credit Suisse is part of the elite R3, a consortium created to find ways to use blockchain as to track money transfers and other transactions, within which more than 100 banks operate right now.
Banks are now looking into different ways to “satisfy” growing customer demands about blockchain and cryptocurrency innovations. The CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, has said many times now that he is open to bitcoin and other digital currencies. The current market capitalization of cryptocurrencies is around $200 billion, surpassing the market cap of Goldman Sachs almost twice.