Peter Thiel doesn’t care for Ethereum, and he doesn’t care much for a few key figures in finance, either. He shared his “enemies list” publicly in a speech at Bitcoin 2022 in Miami today.
Thiel—co-founder of PayPal—called Berkshire Hathaway Chairman and CEO Warren Buffett “a sociopathic grandpa from Omaha.” JP Morgan Chairman Jamie Dimon and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink joined Buffett on Thiel’s list of enemies he wants to “expose.”
Taking a break from throwing cash into the crowd, Thiel accused the three finance moguls of facilitating a system that harbors institutional and political biases against Bitcoin.
“The central banks are bankrupt. We are at the end of the fiat money regime,” Thiel declared. Thiel believes Bitcoin is the ultimate alternative to the entire traditional financial system.
“Bitcoin is not Ethereum as a payment system, it’s not an e-gold, it’s something like the S&P 500, it’s the stock market as a whole,” he said.
Although Ethereum is the second-most-valuable cryptocurrency by market cap, Thiel said he isn’t sure it can maintain its status over the long term.
“Bitcoin and Ethereum are these two extreme opposite ends of the spectrum,” he said, calling Bitcoin “low velocity, high value” and Ethereum “high velocity.” For Thiel, Ethereum’s gas fees “have to go down,” adding that “it has to become completely frictionless for it to work.”
In his speech, the PayPal exec didn’t spare the tech industry, either, with a possible nod to what he sees as liberal-leaning companies such as Meta that have been beholden to government regulations.
“Woke companies are sort of quasi-controlled by the government in a way that Bitcoin never will be,” Thiel said.
While Thiel didn’t name names, he dubbed any ESG firm—companies and investment groups that take environmental and social governance factors into consideration, instead of pure profit maximization—a “hate factory” when it comes to Bitcoin.
“When you’re thinking ESG, you should be thinking CCP,” Thiel proclaimed, referencing China’s governing communist party.
This isn’t the first time Thiel has expressed concerns over the Chinese government. Last year, he said that Bitcoin could be used as a “Chinese financial weapon” and said that Americans should be wary about how China is developing its own digital currency.
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