Peter Thiel Sticks It To The Institutions
Bitcoin has many doubters, something so novel usually does.
Most Baby boomers who have made it big really have no incentive to get rich again, that’s why many aren’t even inclined to listen to its Bitcoin’s pitch.
To most of the boomer success stories, their financial overperformance was underpinned by the US dollar.
The US dollar isn’t your father’s US dollars.
The destruction of purchasing power has roiled the US dollar and now it has become a target to topple.
Clues are there from Russia desiring to settle energy contracts in Russian Rubles.
Saudi Arabia is in talks to do deals with China in the Chinese yuan.
Unsurprisingly, it’s almost natural that successful Americans born during the peak of the US dollar stick to that as a secret sauce.
For the younger generations, the case is a lot more muddled as billionaire PayPal (PYPL) co-founder Peter Thiel shared his list of enemies stopping bitcoin from rising 100x Thursday while speaking at the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami, Florida.
The enemies are “a list of people who I think are stopping bitcoin,” he said. “There’s a lot of them, they tend to have nameless faceless bureaucrat perspectives, which is of course one of the ways they hide.” Thiel continued:
We are going to try to expose them and realize that this is sort of what we have to fight for bitcoin to go up 10x, 100x from here.
“The central banks are going bankrupt. We are at the end of the fiat money regime,” he said.
The first person on the list was Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-B) CEO, Warren Buffett. Thiel put up a picture of Buffett with two of his most famous quotes about bitcoin: “rat poison” and “I don’t own any and I never will.”
It’s fascinating to watch from afar, a war of great minds, and Peter Thiel and Warren Buffett are two heavyweights.
Thiel has had the propensity to behave riskier with his bets which is normal for early-stage tech investors.
He co-founded PayPal, was an early investor in Facebook, and has numerous connections to influential politicians.
Thiel wasn’t talking to the existing Bitcoin base which many are diehards.
He was talking to the incremental investor sitting on the fence.
I understand it’s a leap of faith to jump into a digital currency that produces no cash flow or income.
It’s hard to do mental gymnastics.
Thiel most likely came across as too zealous, painting the dilemma as a binary choice between Bitcoin or fiat currency.
The truth is that both of these can succeed in the future for two entirely different reasons.
They also attract different types of investors which is the beauty of investing.
The next picture he put up was of Blackrock (BLK) CEO Larry Fink, who has been quoted saying Bitcoin is an “index of money laundering” and who also presides over $9 trillion of managed money.
Ostensibly appearing as if this is a binary choice placing the biggest beneficiaries of the fiat monetary system in this generation is more of a dramatic effect if anything else.
The truth is that Blackrock’s Fink is starting to change his tune about Bitcoin and his firm Blackrock is looking into how they can make money for the clients using not only equity funds.
Many of these guys on Thiel’s list have fiduciary responsibilities to their shareholders and throwing $9 trillion at Bitcoin would violate any sort of risk control.
Instead of alienating institutional money, Thiel has chosen an undiplomatic way to call out the corporate money that hasn’t bought into Bitcoin like retail investors.
Bitcoin has stayed very much in the limelight in 2022 and it’s clear that as a $2 trillion industry, it’s not going away.
Ultimately, Bitcoin’s price action has been somewhat disappointing since its surge to $65,000 last year, but that doesn’t mean it is a failure.
Consolidating and digesting a giant gap up is natural.
The technical support at $38,000 has held up nicely, and Thiel’s call to action to take it back to $65,000 won’t move the needle in one day but alerts many billionaires that if they miss this ride up, it might be the biggest missed opportunity of a lifetime.
