What Jamie Dimon Is Missing About Bitcoin
But he seems to have missed Mr. Marks’s subsequent backflip in which, while remaining a skeptic, the hedge fund mogul wrote, “There’s
absolutely no reason why Bitcoin — or anything else — can’t serve as a currency if enough people accept it as such.”
Mr. Dimon is also too modest about JPMorgan’s own achievements in this arena.
In Mr. Dimon’s telling, Bitcoin has value only for people who want to bypass the traditional banking system for illicit purposes, including “murderers
and drug dealers,” or people living in countries with repressive governments like North Korea and Venezuela.
Mr. Dimon’s comments may have come as a surprise to the dozens of employees at his bank working
on projects related to blockchain, the bookkeeping technology underpinning digital currencies.
Yet as one of the world’s foremost bankers, Mr. Dimon is plainly aware that countries also create fiat currencies out of thin air.
Presumably, Mr. Dimon doesn’t think Etherereum, whose value is up more than 2,000 percent over the last year, is also a modern version of tulip mania.
In his comments, Mr. Dimon cited the famed investor Howard Marks, who in a July memo to his clients referred to Bitcoin as an unfounded fad.