Reiterating comments made on Bitcoin last year, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon yet again termed cryptocurrencies a ‘scam’ which need to be shut down. The veteran banker told Bloomberg that he has no interest in Bitcoin. Since governments are unable to control these cryptocurrencies, these should be shut down by them, he also told Bloomberg. Earlier, in September last year Jamie Dimon had called Bitcoin a fraud. He had then said that he would fire any employee he founds trading bitcoin for being ‘stupid.’
If a JPMorgan trader began trading in bitcoin, he had said, “I’d fire them in a second. For two reasons: It’s against our rules, and they’re stupid. And both are dangerous.” He had also said that the cryptocurrency “won’t end well,” and will eventually blow up. “It’s a fraud” and “worse than tulip bulbs,” he had famously said then in an investor conference.
Jut days back, in a hard-hitting opinion in the New York Times titled ‘Transaction Costs and Tethers: Why I’m a Crypto Skeptic’, noted economist Paul Krugman had said, “…Cryptocurrency enthusiasts are effectively celebrating the use of cutting-edge technology to set the monetary system back 300 years.”
“Banknotes worked because people knew something about the banks that issued them, and these banks had an incentive to preserve their reputation. Governments have occasionally abused the privilege of creating fiat money, but for the most part governments and central banks exercise restraint, again because they care about their reputations,” Paul Krugman wrote.
“But you’re supposed to be sure that a Bitcoin is real without knowing who issued it, so you need the digital equivalent of biting a gold coin to be sure it’s the real deal, and the costs of producing something that satisfies that test have to be high enough to discourage fraud,” he had added.
