Well, you can add the name of Bill Harris to the bitcoin community’s enemies list a la Richard Nixon.
The founder of Personal Capital Corp and former CEO of PayPal and Intuit wrote an op-ed in Recode, where he slammed the peer-to-peer decentralized virtual currency. He noted that he got tired of saying it’s speculative, gambling, and a bubble. Now he is being frank in his assessment: it’s a scam.
“It’s a colossal pump-and-dump scheme, the likes of which the world has never seen… the losers are ill-informed buyers caught up in the spiral of greed. The result is a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary families to internet promoters,” he wrote.
He continued:
“Cryptocurrency is best-suited for one use: Criminal activity.
All of this would be a comic sideshow if innocent people weren’t at risk. But ordinary people are investing some of their life savings in cryptocurrency.”
Moving forward, he wants the U.S. government to intervene.
“It’s time we gave them the legislative authority to do their job,” he said.
No matter what you think about the cryptocurrency, it’s better that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and other authorities didn’t step in.
It seems like the cryptocurrency is suffering from buyer exhaustion, since it can’t seem to muster up any significant rally like it did a year ago. At the time of this writing, bitcoin is trading at just under $9,000.
That said, Bill Harris, there will now be a target on your back! You’re joining the same club as Jamie Dimon and Robert Shiller.
So basically he says it’s like Social Security except we willing participate instead of being forced? Now he wants the government to force a end to us willingly participating. May be I think Pay Pal makes too much and should be forced to charge less? I’m sure government can run Pay Pal better than he can.