In today’s Money Morning…the enemies list…enemy number one was Warren Buffett…the good news? You’re still early…and more…
‘Buy Bitcoin, not sh**coins’…
Not the words I ever expected to hear coming from a man my parents’ age.
Never mind that he’s the third richest man in Mexico, 67-year-old billionaire Ricardo Salinas.
He told a packed-out Bitcoin Conference in Miami last week:
‘You have to buy bitcoin (keep buying when the price is low), then just hold your BTC, forget about selling… Trust me you’re going to thank me later.’
Funnily enough, the ‘sh**coins’ he was referring to included fiat currencies like the dollar, euro, and yen.
He said they were a trap, stating:
‘Governments don’t like bitcoin … it burns them that people can get out of their fiat trap because that is what fiat money is, a fraud.’
He also told the audience about an early personal experience of hyperinflation in Mexico when his monthly wage fell from US$2,000 per month down to the equivalent of US$20 per month.
A story that he said is now being repeated worldwide.
Salinas said he has 60% of his wealth now in Bitcoin [BTC]. An astonishingly high allocation for a man of his means.
Though, he conceded that the battle for the future of money will be hard fought.
Showing a picture of Agustin Carstens, director of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), Christine Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank, and Janet Yellen, Secretary of the Treasury of the United States (all with devil’s horns added!), Salinas called them the ‘high priests’ of fiat.
He warned:
‘But their religion is not tolerant and they hate heretics. I see a lot of heretics in this room today and that’s fine, but you need to know what the next trick these guys will have up their sleeves.
‘They call it a very beautiful acronym CBDC that refers to the digital currency of the central bank, which is worse than the dollar because with it they will be able to control everything that people can spend or not spend.
‘Plus, they will keep track of 100% of all your expenses, what you spend and how you spend it. They are very diabolical people.’
Salinas — or Uncle Ricky as Bitcoiners now call him — wasn’t the only one taking pot shots at the financial establishment in Miami…
The enemies list
Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal with Elon Musk back in 1998, and one of the most successful Silicon Valley investors of all time, was a keynote speaker at the event.
He’s an interesting character and understands the intersection of tech and money more than most.
Worth about US$5.3 billion, he’s also an arch libertarian Stanford graduate and a gay German-American conservative who’s at odds with much of the wokeness in the US tech scene.
Which makes his views refreshing, to say the least!
And like ‘Uncle Ricky’, he says the fiat system is coming to an end.
As reported in Forbes:
‘Thiel also criticized central banks around the world, slamming them for their slow uptake on digital technology. The increase in bitcoin’s value over the last several years is “telling us that the central banks are bankrupt,” he said. It’s “telling us that we’re at the end of the fiat money regime.”’
Interestingly, though, Thiel stated that bitcoin was poised not just to take over the market cap of an asset like gold but of global equities.
As reported in MCCF Tech:
‘In fact, Thiel believes that there should be parity between the market capitalization of global equities and that of Bitcoin. For reference, global equities currently have a market cap of around $115 trillion, while this metric for Bitcoin is hovering at $807 billion right now. Thiel then said:
“I am still hopeful that bitcoin goes up by a factor of 100x.”
‘Should this prediction pan out, it would equate to an astounding situation where 1 Bitcoin would be worth over $4 million!’
His rationale for this view appears to be that equity markets would underperform relative to bitcoin in a high-inflation environment.
We’ll see…
Like Salinas, Thiel sees this as a war.
Railing against the current financial ‘gerontocracy’ who are actively trying to stop the crypto movement, Thiel produced an ‘enemies list’.
Enemy number one was Warren Buffett. He called Buffett — a man who once said bitcoin was ‘rat poison squared’ — a ‘sociopathic Grandpa’.
Ouch!
Others who made the ‘list’ included JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink.
The common theme was that these people controlled the financial system — and made a lot of money from this control — and that was behind their crypto scepticism.
I mean, there is an argument to be made that Buffett is one of the most ‘bailed out’ investors in history.
For example, he was actually one of the architects of the massive 2008 GFC bailout to ‘save the US banking system’. Funnily enough, he was a huge investor in said banks!
Anyway, I digress…
Thiel and Salinas’ main point — which I agree with — is that the fiat system is a fraud. And the people that want to stop bitcoin are the very people that benefit most from that fraud.
Bitcoin is the only escape…
The good news? You’re still early
These were just two speakers who spoke at Bitcoin 2022.
There were speakers from all parts of the globe and across all walks of life. I even know a few diehard Bitcoiners who complained it wasn’t ‘Bitcoin enough’!
For example, speakers included North Korean human rights activist Yeonmi Park, US Senator Cynthia Lummis, and American footballer Odell Beckham Jr.
But that’s what happens when you start to go mainstream…
Bitcoin is many different things to many different people: An asset, a payment network, a means to escape totalitarian regimes, an energy grid stabiliser, pristine collateral, a reserve asset…
Critics — and even some supporters — don’t get the full breadth of what bitcoin actually is. Which is why it’s still very early to get in.
As this tweet put it:
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| Source: Twitter |
Anyway, it was a big conference, and it sets the scene for a big 2022 in bitcoin.
I’ll leave you with four of my ‘must-watch’ videos:
· Ricardo Salinas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0LKOGnuox4
· Peter Thiel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ko6K82pXcPA
· Jack Mallers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD2-T7TX2rk
· Billionaire Capital Allocators: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JA7WJmcA67U
Good investing,
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Ryan Dinse,
Editor, Money Morning
PS: Some entrepreneurial Aussie Bitcoiners have started a FREE online educational course that explains how bitcoin fits into the current financial system. If you’re looking for a very easy-to-follow introduction to how the financial world works, this is very good. Check it out here.
