Peter Thiel, former CEO of PayPal, expressed doubts about the possibility of the price of Bitcoin rising significantly from current levels.
The billionaire — who still owns “a bit'” of Bitcoin, but not as much “should have” — it’s not sure where the next group of buyers will come from now that Bitcoin has had its say “ETF edition”.
“I’m not sure it’s going to go up that dramatically from here on out. We’ve had the ETF edition and I don’t know who else is going to buy.”Thiel, founder of Founders Fund, told CNBC on June 28.
“It can probably still go up a little bit, but it will be a volatile and bumpy ride.”
We report a tweet from — Swan (@Swan) https://twitter.com/Swan/status/1806797074093981855?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
NEW‼️- Billionaire Peter Thiel:
I didn’t buy many #Bitcoin as much as I should have. pic.twitter.com/AtklzIw9ME
NEW‼️- Billionaire Peter Thiel:
I didn’t buy as much #Bitcoin as I should have. pic.twitter.com/AtklzIw9ME
— Swan (@Swan) https://twitter.com/Swan/status/1806797074093981855?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Thiel had already declared that he was “underinvested” in Bitcoin in October 2021, just as the cryptocurrency was climbing back towards its previous all-time high of $69,000, set about three weeks later.
However, Thiel’s Founders Fund has a pretty impressive history with Bitcoin: it made its first Bitcoin investment in 2014 and made $1.8 billion just before the market crashed in 2022.
The Founders Fund then purchased another $100 million in Bitcoin in 2023, when it was trading below $30,000.
Bitcoin is not so cypherpunk
Thiel explained that Bitcoin has not turned out to be as cypherpunk as he originally predicted.
“The thing that convinces me least is the question of the founding ideological vision of Bitcoin as a cypherpunk, crypto-anarchist, libertarian, anti-centralized government thing.”
“That’s what struck me as formidable”Thiel recalled when he first came across Bitcoin.
Related: Fidelity Exec Says Investors Should Have Some Allocation to Bitcoin
But now he believes that Bitcoin “it doesn’t really work that way”.
“When people at the FBI tell me they would rather criminals use Bitcoin than $100 bills, it makes me think that maybe it’s not working as well as it was supposed to.”
However, Bitcoin was designed to be a public, permissionless, decentralized ledger, and transactions were not intended to be completely untraceable like Monero and other privacy-focused networks.
Bitcoin is currently trading at $60,450, down 1.8% over the past 24 hours.
