After Jamie Dimon's recent CNBC comments at Davos, I've decided he's an Inverse Bitcoin Maximilist. He says blockchain is okay and that there are two types of cryptocurrencies: those that might "do something" and then there's the one that does nothing, "the pet rock, the bitcoin or something like that."
So, he says that cryptocurrencies can have use cases that are real and legit, but bitcoin's only use cases are fraud, money laundering, tax avoidance, and sex trafficking.
In this way, Jamie Dimon is the opposite of a bitcoin maximalist. Maxis say bitcoin is the only true coin, all the others are poopcoins. Dimon says the others are the true coins, bitcoin is the poopcoin. He's an inverse maxi.
Trying to figure this guy out, I guess the only options are:
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He has no clue. Like Warren Buffet or Charlie Munger, I think he's intelligent, but for some reason there's a tick in his brain that disallows him from "getting it." By "getting it," I'm referring mostly to the hard money properties of bitcoin and main use case of value storage over time. It seems simple to me...that fact is the main bitcoin use case. A use-case doesn't need to be immediate. Buying a coffee is a use case, yes, but so is waiting ten years to buy a thousand coffees. His talk gives evidence to possible cluelessness. He said the 21,000,000 supply cap might actually not be finite (how do we know?) and that Satoshi (mispronounced) might just pop back up (in 100 years) and wipe out all the bitcoin. Umm...okay.
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He totally has a clue, but he's a puppet to banks. As CEO of a major bank, maybe he absolutely gets it and understands bitcoin as a threat to the current banking model. Maybe he understands that if enough people also "get it," they'll also realize that they don't really need him and his bank. In this way, he's not acting entirely irrationally.
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Or, to be fair, maybe it's just that he's right and we're all wrong.
Since Dimon just got a salary bump from $34.5 million/year to $36 (gotta pay for that inflation dawg!), I think #2 is the most likely option. For $36M/year, I think a lot of people would happily be a mouthpiece sock puppet for the paycheck-writer and say bitcoin is a "pet rock." I would.
As an aside, I just love how says bitcoiners "do bitcoin." Never thought of it that way, but okay.
Doing bitcoin