Bitcoin: JP Morgan boss calls it “a fraud that will blow up”

The boss of America’s biggest bank, JP Morgan, has been quoted in The Guardian saying that bitcoin is “a fraud that will blow up”. The cryptocurrency is only fit for use by drug-dealers, other criminals and people living in places like Venezuela and North Korea, Jamie Dimon said. He was speaking at a conference in New York.

Dimon said he would fire “in a second” anyone at JP Morgan found to be trading in bitcoin. “For two reasons: it’s against our rules, and they’re stupid. And both are dangerous….The currency isn’t going to work. You can’t have a business where people can invent a currency out of thin air and think that people who are buying it are really smart.”

“It is worse than tulip bulbs,” Dimon told the conference, referring to the Dutch economic disaster of 1637, known as Tulip Mania, in which speculation on something unreal, caused by popular delusion – the price of the newly discovered tulip bulbs – led to financial catastrophe.

Key people in Malta are raving about bitcoin as the next big thing. They would do well to read what Jamie Dimon has to say about it. Are they so arrogant as to think they know more than the man who runs America’s biggest bank? I’m more interested in his views, and consider them more reliable as expert opinion, than in the views of Joseph Muscat and those behind him who are pushing bitcoin for their own nefarious ends.

Those who need to launder the proceeds of crime and corruption need bitcoin. But civilised society does not.